The Depart­ment of Home Affairs has launched a dedicated portal to assist South Afric­ans abroad who are uncon­sti­tu­tion­ally stripped of their cit­izen­ship, reports The Herald.

The launch – a fur­ther step in the digital trans­form­a­tion of the depart­ment’s pro­cesses – comes in the wake of a Con­sti­tu­tional Court judg­ment in May which declared a sec­tion of the SA Cit­izen­ship Act uncon­sti­tu­tional inso­far as it auto­mat­ic­ally stripped South Afric­ans of their cit­izen­ship if they acquired another nation­al­ity without the prior per­mis­sion of the Home Affairs Min­is­ter.

The judg­ment, which took imme­di­ate effect, con­firmed an earlier SCA rul­ing and restored SA cit­izen­ship to all indi­vidu­als who had lost it under this pro­vi­sion since 6 Octo­ber 1995.

The court held that strip­ping cit­izens of their nation­al­ity without suf­fi­cient cause was uncon­sti­tu­tional and ruled that affected indi­vidu­als were now deemed never to have lost their cit­izen­ship.

To admin­is­trat­ively pro­cess the out­come of the court rul­ing, the depart­ment has developed a ‘cit­izen­ship rein­state­ment portal’ to help South Afric­ans, par­tic­u­larly those liv­ing abroad, verify and con­firm their status and, where neces­sary, com­plete remain­ing steps for the depart­ment to admin­is­trat­ively pro­cess their cit­izen­ship.

‘This plat­form marks another mile­stone in our mis­sion to mod­ern­ise Home Affairs ser­vices and ensure that all South Afric­ans, regard­less of where they live, have effi­cient access to dig­ni­fied ser­vices,’ Home Affairs Min­is­ter Leon Schreiber said.

He said the portal provided secure digital authen­tic­a­tion, advanced doc­u­ment and bio­met­ric veri­fic­a­tion, integ­ra­tion with the national pop­u­la­tion register and a user-friendly inter­face to track the applic­a­tion pro­gress.

South Afric­ans abroad can begin the pro­cess by vis­it­ing the Home Affairs’ web­site.

Full report in The Herald