When a Population Register gets Taken to Court: A Case Study of the Practice of ID-Blocking in South Africa

Keith Breckenridge, University of the Witwatersrand
Jonathan Klaaren, WISER, University of the Witwatersrand

In January, 2024, the South African high court in Pretoria revealed that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) had been stripping hundreds of thousands of people of their identity numbers, and their ability to live as citizens. This paper examines the institutional and economic connections that motivated the ID-stripping leading up to the court case and in the months afterwards. The paper examines the evolution of the biometric deduplication project, the relationship between the DHA and the banking industry and the political pressures emerging from the political parties around the problems of demographic growth and migration in South Africa.

Keywords: Civil Registration and Vital Statistics, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session 75. Population Registers, Human Rights and Ethics