South Africa police remove refugees protesting at UNHCR office

Police in South Africa are removing about 150 refugees who the United Nations refugee agency says forced their way into its compound while protesting recent anti-immigrant attacks.

On October 8, asylum-seekers started a sit-in in front of the offices of the UN refugee agency in South Africa's Pretoria.

Friday’s action in Pretoria follows a similar one last month in which police arrested and dispersed hundreds of refugees and asylum-seekers, including children, who had camped for weeks outside the UN agency's office in Cape Town.

A similar protest was quashed in Cape Town after demonstrators were forcefully evicted from the building last month.  

The sit-in was sparked by a wave of xenophobic violence in September.   

South Africa is one of the few countries in the world that allows asylum-seekers to work, have access to health care and study while their applications are being processed.

That reputation helped attract more than a million asylum-seekers between 2007 and 2015, one of the world's highest, according to the government.

With high hopes to begin with, most have faced a lengthy, confusing and increasingly backlogged process.

The UNHCR has voiced concern about the number of "pending cases".

Human rights lawyer Sharon Elkambaram lamented the lack of "political will" to process applications. 

"The quality of the decision-making is shocking," she added.

South Africa processed more than 630,000 applications over the past decade, less than 10 percent of which were granted refugee status.