IMMIGRATION AMENDMENT BILL UPDATE

IMMIGRATION AMENDMENT BILL UPDATE

• 17 September 2025
• Parliament
• SA Legal Academy

A ‘B’ version of the Immigration Amendment Bill is now before the NCOP, having been passed by the National Assembly on 11 September 2025.

The Bill was submitted to Parliament in draft form in March 2024, as SA Legal Academy reported at the time, its purpose is to give effect to Constitutional Court judgments delivered on 29 June 2017 and 30 October 2023 in terms of which the principal statute must be amended to ensure that any illegal foreigner detained under section 34(1):

• ‘is brought before a court in person, within 48 hours from the time of his or her arrest’, enabling
• ‘the court to determine whether it is in the interests of justice to order further detention, for purposes of deportation’.

A parliamentary media statement announcing the Bill’s transmission to the NCOP for concurrence makes no mention of the thinking behind changes made by the National Assembly’s Home Affairs Committee to the original Bill, which was formally introduced in April 2024. A committee report tabled with the revised Bill also omitted these details.

According to a committee statement issued on 11 June 2025, the Bill’s ‘B’ version seeks to address ‘various contentious issues’ presumably raised during the committee’s mandatory public hearings. These included a requirement that ‘the interest-of-justice criteria … guid(ing) immigration officials in making detention decisions for undocumented immigrants … (should) be codified in the Bill's regulations’. The committee’s intervention:

• was ‘premised on the view that the department’s standard operating procedure is inaccessible to the public and can be amended without stakeholder interaction’, and that
• ‘codifying it in the regulations would enable parliamentary oversight of accountability’.

Please click the links below for more information:

• Bill’s ‘B’ version
• ‘A’ list reflecting amendment adopted by the National Assembly committee
• June 2025 committee media statement
• original Bill
• committee report tabled with the revised Bill (page 57 of the parliamentary papers)
• 11 September 2025 parliamentary media statement
• October 2023 Constitutional Court ruling
• April 2024 SA Legal Academy report
• BusinessTech article

Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch

Follow us on X @SALegalAcademy (you can also join us on LinkedIn and Facebook)

If you use this information in articles, reports and social media posts of your own, please acknowledge SA Legal Academy Policy Watch as your source

0 COMMENTS

LEAVE A COMMENT