Cape Town – South Africa is sitting on a backlog of 161,000 asylum seeker appeal cases, the Department of Home Affairs told Parliament on Tuesday, in a briefing that laid bare the scale of the country’s struggling refugee adjudication system.
The story was first reported by GroundUp.
Of the 161,000 cases, 70,976 are active, meaning the applicants continue to renew their asylum permits while waiting for an outcome. The remaining 90,024 are classified as inactive because the whereabouts of those applicants are unknown, usually because they have died, left the country or moved into other immigration categories such as spousal or critical skills visas. 
The Refugee Appeals Authority, which handles refugee applications rejected by Refugee Status Determination Officers, launched a backlog project in 2021 in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, when the backlog stood at 133,582 cases. Since then, 19,064 cases have been finalised, but new applications have continued to pour in, pushing the total beyond 161,000.
Appeals authority chairperson Advocate Zilpha Raphesu told the portfolio committee on Tuesday that funding constraints have severely hampered the project. The UNHCR only funded ten people to adjudicate appeal applications out of the 36 who were supposed to be part of the project. The authority began recruiting part-time advocates in 2025 to help with adjudication.
Raphesu said asylum seekers often abuse judicial review processes to avoid deportation. “So far in the Backlog Project, in the work we’ve done, we’ve received 2,733 judicial reviews,” she said, adding that the majority involved applicants from Ethiopia at 1,509 cases, the Democratic Republic of Congo at 411 and Bangladesh at 211.
She said many of the reviews are lodged at the last minute when applicants are facing deportation from the Lindela holding facility. “These are disgruntled appellants who feel that maybe the High Court will come to a different conclusion from us,” she said.
Responding to criticism from Members of Parliament, Raphesu said the authority is intensifying efforts to reduce the backlog through digitisation and new adjudication strategies. “The South African asylum process is marred by opportunistic claims that are clogging the process of adjudication,” she said.
She also revealed that the appeals authority had requested Gauteng Judge President Dunstan Mlambo to allocate dedicated courts for judicial reviews, but that nothing has come of that request.
Home Affairs acting deputy director Mandla Madumisa added that digitisation had already helped the department identify more than 20,000 duplicate cases where asylum seekers also appeared on other immigration permit systems.
