A South African court has ordered an anti-migrant group to stop blocking foreign nationals from accessing public health facilities and schools, saying such actions are illegal.<\/p>\n
Operation Dudula has in recent months picketed hospitals and clinics in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces, checking identity cards and stopping anyone who is not South African from entering. This has since extended to schools.<\/p>\n
But the high court in Johannesburg has ordered the group to stop “intimidating, harassing [or] interfering with access” to these facilities.<\/p>\n
South Africa is home to about 2.4 million migrants, just less than 4% of the population, according to official figures.<\/p>\n
Most come from neighbouring countries such as Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, which have a history of providing migrant labour to their wealthy neighbour.<\/p>\n
Xenophobia has long been an issue in South Africa, which has been accompanied by occasional outbursts of deadly violence, and anti-migrant sentiment has become a key political talking-point.<\/p>\n
Judge Leicester Adams, handing down judgment on Tuesday, also barred Operation Dudula from making statements that can be construed as hate speech, “unlawfully evicting foreign nationals from their homes… [or] from their trading stalls” and instigating others to do so.<\/p>\n
“Dudula” means to remove something by force in the Zulu language.<\/p>\n
The organisation says it is disappointed by the ruling and intends to appeal against it, according to South African online publication News24.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A South African court has ordered an anti-migrant group to stop blocking foreign nationals from accessing public health…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263207,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-263206","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}