Pretoria - Come Wednesday when the country’s schools open for the 2020 academic year, no school may turn a pupil away - local or foreign - if they do not have IDs, permits or passports.
The judge president of that division, Judge Selby Mbenenge, ruled that the department acted unconstitutionally in not permitting children to continue receiving education in public schools, purely because they lacked ID documents. While the judgment was sparked by an application launched on behalf of undocumented pupils in the Eastern Cape, the Centre for Child Law, which challenged the provisions barring these children from the education system, said the order, in no uncertain terms, prevents the removal or exclusion from schools of children by reason that they do not have identity document numbers, permits or passports.
In his ruling, Judge Mbenenge ordered that the schools in the Eastern Cape, which barred these undocumented children because they could not provide a birth certificate, had to accept an alternative form of identification.
And that judge must give them ID's and money to further their education 🤨