Rosalind Elphick |
SAWIP Alumnus, Working and Living on the Frontier between South Africa and Zimbabwe
 Rosalind consulting with client. During my time with SAWIP in 2008, we spent World Refugee Day at the National Geographic Headquarters in DC watching a documentary filmed in Uganda, War Dance. The story centred around three children – all members of the Acholi ethnic group, living in the remote northern Uganda refugee camp of Patongo under the military protection from the Lord's Resistance Army.
At the time I was a law student at the University of Cape Town. I was in my fourth year of study towards my LLB, and the time was ripe for us to start sending applications for articles off to law firms for consideration as candidate attorneys. I remember being in two minds as to whether the corporate route was really what I wanted.
In many ways, I remember this morning as a defining moment. I emerged from that cinema feeling so affected by the stories of those three children and the thousands that they represented, that I had, for the first time ever, a great sense of clarity. I scrapped my applications for fancy law firms and turned my attention towards the completion of a Masters in Human Rights.
In the years that followed, I steadily worked towards gaining the experience that I would need to bring me closer to being able to assist persons caught up in violent conflict, ethnic cleansing and other forms of human rights abuses. I got involved as a translator and later a full-time legal counseling intern at the Refugee Rights Project and started work as a researcher for the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women.
It is now four years later. I am currently living on the frontier between South Africa and Zimbabwe, in a town flanking Beitbridge Border Post, one of the busiest posts in the world. South Africa has received the largest number of asylum-seekers in the world for the last three years running. Most of these arrive from Zimbabwe and the more northern parts of Africa through this border crossing. They arrive in all manners imaginable: hidden in trucks, swimming through the Limpopo with their bags over their heads, or smuggled under the bridge and through the bush surrounding the town. And they arrive almost inevitably without any form of documentation, some of them pregnant, and most of them without any resources.
Facing this wave of migration, I began working for Lawyers for Human Rights on their Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme, specifically the Statelessness Project. I have worked on this project since its inception and have been able to exercise a large amount of discretion as to its design and implementation. We are the only legal practitioners in the country spearheading this issue, and so it has been both interesting and challenging.
Working within the refugee and asylum system for the last few years, and presently focusing more specifically on stateless persons, I have found myself frequently disheartened. Progress is very slow and some days I feel as though I am not making any difference at all... To date, no dedicated legal mechanism exists in South Africa for the protection of stateless persons and so we have had to feel our way around in the darkto an extent. Also, living in quite a remote town it is also easy to lose perspective. But in those moments, I remind myself of how far I have tread along the path that I set for myself that morning on SAWIP. I haven’t been able to achieve all of my goals yet, but I am at least on the way. And I am extremely grateful to be in this privileged position; to be able to follow my heart in my job.
Articles written by Rosalind and media attention the project has received:
http://www.lhr.org.za/publications/lhr-briefing-paper-towards-universal-birth-registration
http://www.lhr.org.za/publications/towards-ratification-statelessness-treaties
http://www.lhr.org.za/publications/submission-draft-regulations-births-and-deaths-registration-act-no-51-1992-submission-d
http://www.lhr.org.za/sites/lhr.org.za/files/lhr_briefing_paper_on_refusal_of_entry.pdf
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