The Lindela Repatriation Centre from 1996-2014: A Theoretical Explication of Human Rights Violations

This article is based on media content analysis of more than 230 newspaper articles written on the Lindela Repatriation Centre from its establishment in 1996-2014. This centre is “one of South Africa’s largest facilities for the holding of undocumented migrants” (Bosasa, 2015). The articles were sourced via SA Media’s official website http://www.samedia.uovs.ac.za. The articles overly depict the centre as a hub of “human rights violations” (South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), 2014); Democratic Alliance (DA), 2015). The study juxtaposes the South African Constitution’s Bill of Rights, and how this was supposedly in consonance with the establishment of the centre, to the grotesque human rights violations that have occurred there since its inception. In light of this, this article draws on the theorising of Giorgio Agamben (1998), and particularly his theoretical contribution of the “homo sacer,” one who has been left behind or been excluded from the territorial boundaries that confer the rights of citizenship. The detainees at the centre are, therefore, to a great degree living in a “state of exception.” In the “state of exception” the legal order becomes in force only by suspending itself (Mika Ojakangas, 2005: 9). In this article, I argue that undocumented immigrants are often treated as “bare life”, as individuals who are subject to the suspension of the law within the context of the centre. Since they are non-citizens of the recipient state, these actions culminate to xenophobia, which Owen Sichone (2008) argues that its manifestation is “a gross violation of human rights.”