For Ahmed Mohammed Ali, the question of where he belongs has now been answered in a courtroom in Johannesburg, and not in his favour. A Somali national who arrived in South Africa in 2008 after fleeing persecution by Al-Shabaab, Ali has lost his refugee status, and with it the life he built over more than a decade in a country he once hoped to make permanent.
The South Gauteng High Court dismissed his application to review and set aside the decision of the Standing Committee for Refugee Affairs to withdraw his status. In a recent judgment, Judge Mokate Victor Noko found that Ali had voluntarily re-availed himself of his country’s protection, and that his challenge could not succeed.
The story that brought Ali to court began with hope and, in the authorities’ eyes, ended in deception. After years of residing in South Africa, he applied to be certified as an indefinite refugee, a step that could eventually open the door to permanent residence. He enlisted the services of a person who claimed to be an immigration agent and promised to expedite the application. A certificate was obtained. On December 15, 2017, Ali applied for permanent residence.
While processing that application, the Department of Home Affairs discovered that the certificate was fraudulent. His permanent residence application was rejected on July 9, 2018, and the authorities later moved to withdraw his refugee status, citing the fraudulent document.
What followed compounded his difficulties. On March 5, 2024, the authorities issued a notice of their intention to withdraw his status and invited him to submit written representations. During an interview on November 7, 2024, it emerged that Ali had travelled to Hargeisa on March 2, 2017, returning to South Africa on May 15, 2017. The authorities regarded that three-month visit as re-availment of protection under the Refugees Act, which provides that a person may cease to qualify for refugee status if they voluntarily re-avail themselves of the protection of their country of nationality. The law also allows travel abroad in violation of conditions endorsed on refugee travel documents to be deemed re-availment.
For Ali, the trip had a deeply personal explanation. In his court papers, he said he travelled to Hargeisa to visit his terminally ill father, who died and was buried on May 13, 2017. He argued that the stay should not count as re-availment because it was motivated by humanitarian circumstances, and maintained that his visit was not voluntary in the relevant legal sense. He said he had neither sought nor obtained effective protection from Somalia, describing Hargeisa as being in a “no-man’s land”, which he called Somaliland.
Meanwhile, his legal representative, J Malapane, argued that the authorities had failed to establish the requirements for withdrawal on the basis of re-availment, that the decision was irrational, that the authorities were reasonably suspected of bias, and that the withdrawal violated the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits returning refugees to countries where they face persecution.
The judge was not persuaded. Noko found that Ali had not mentioned his sick father in the written representations he submitted to the authorities in May 2025; the explanation surfaced only in his court papers in February 2026. The judge said Ali had failed to explain the omission and described the explanation as an afterthought, an attempt to mould his case to fit the requirements of the United Nations refugee framework.
“Without more, this cannot be viewed as an occasional visit; it appears opportunistic and indefensible,” Noko said of the three-month stay. The court found that Ali had travelled voluntarily, knew that citizens were protected in Hargeisa, and had accessed that protection. It also held that the withdrawal decision was rationally connected to the information before the authorities, and that there was no evidence of bias.
On the question of deportation, Noko rejected the non-refoulement argument. South Africa does not recognise Somaliland as an independent country, and the judge found that Hargeisa is in Somalia and is safe, with citizens protected there. Ali, the court concluded, could be deported to that part of Somalia without violating the principle.
The application was ultimately doomed, the judge found, because Ali had not challenged the withdrawal on the basis of the fraudulent certificate, and because his trip fell within the circumstances prescribed by the Refugees Act and its regulations as re-availment of protection. Further detail on the judgment is available at https://iol.co.za/news/crime-and-courts/2026-11-05-somali-man-loses-refugee-status-after-fraudulent-certificate-and-three-month-visit-to-home-country/
For a man who fled Al-Shabaab and spent years building a life in South Africa, the ruling leaves a stark outcome: his refugee status withdrawn, his permanent residence hopes long extinguished, and a possible return to a country he once escaped. Whether Ali will now face deportation to Hargeisa, the city where he buried his father, remains the open question.