Should a refugee have to secure a separate work permit before taking a job, on top of the refugee status a government has already granted them?
It is a question the region is wrestling with, and answering inconsistently.
Uganda, which hosts almost two million refugees and asylum seekers, Africa’s largest population, has long answered ambiguously.
Its 2006 Refugees Act promises refugees the right to work, move freely and access services.
In practice, immigration officers have often arrested refugees who lacked a separate work permit under the Uganda Citizenship and Immigration Control Act.
The stakes have grown as aid has thinned. Roughly a third of Uganda’s refugees rely on World Food Programme assistance, making the right to earn a living a matter of survival.
On July 10, the High Court in Kampala tried to settle the matter.
The inconvenience
The case, Kasajja Brian versus Attorney General and Inter-Aid Uganda, was brought on behalf of Suther Rajesh Kumar, an urban refugee twice arrested for working: once with an asylum seeker’s certificate, and again in 2017 after obtaining a Refugee Identity Card.
He spent nearly two years on an immigration bond. His wife, a recognised Congolese refugee, offered to stand as surety. Officials rejected her and demanded someone with an Indian passport.
Much of Kumar’s broader case collapsed for want of evidence. Claims of unlawful detention, discrimination and torture were dismissed because no charge sheet, police register or medical report backed them up.
But the court found that his arrest, as the spouse of a recognised refugee, breached protections for refugee family members under section 36 of the Refugees Act.
It went further, declaring that any recognised refugee holding a valid Refugee Identity Card may work in Uganda without a separate permit, and barring arrests or prosecutions on that basis alone.
The legal reasoning
The judgment leans on overlapping guarantees: Article 40 of the constitution, extending the right to a livelihood regardless of nationality; the Refugees Act, granting recognised refugees ‘gainful employment’; and Article 17 of the 1951 Refugee Convention, requiring favourable treatment for refugees.
The court effectively read immigration permit requirements as inapplicable to residents the legislature had already granted a more generous right.
Uganda’s courts have, therefore, gone further than most regional peers. South Africa’s amended Refugees Act allows recognised refugees to seek employment freely but withholds automatic permission from asylum seekers, who must have their documentation specially endorsed.
The ‘right to work’ in Africa is not one settled continental standard but a patchwork, and Kampala’s High Court has nudged Uganda toward the liberal end.
The ruling has limits. TASLAF Advocates lawyers stress that the Refugees Act expressly grants employment rights to recognised refugees, while regulations link employment to a valid Refugee Identity Card.
The ruling protects recognised refugees with a Refugee Identity Card. It says less about thousands still waiting to learn whether their asylum claims will succeed.
They can point to broad language about fundamental rights, but not the specific statutory protection recognised refugees have.
Employers hiring someone on an asylum seeker’s certificate alone therefore face uncertainty this judgment does not remove unless a future case tests asylum seekers’ position.
What lawyers are saying
Four TASLAF Advocates lawyers; managing partner Stephen Tumwesigye, senior associate Ruth Nanjobe, associate partner Kevin Ayebare and legal associate Samalie Liz Nakasiga, have outlined the practical consequences for employers.
Their reading is that firms may hire a refugee on a Refugee Identity Card alone, without sponsoring a work permit, provided the card is genuine and current.
That contrasts with Kenya, where a 2021 law entitles refugees to apply for Class M work permits.
Yet researchers monitoring the World Bank-backed Shirika Plan find reform remains largely on paper, with permits difficult to obtain and encampment rules constraining movement.
TASLAF says a recognised refugee with a Refugee Identity Card may be employed without first obtaining a work or entry permit. Employers should still verify and retain copies of the card and comply with the Employment Act’s non-discrimination obligations.
The lawyers add two cautions. First, the government appeared in court but did not argue against the claim. A case in which it pushes back could challenge the ruling.
Second, the court protects refugees from arrest for working without a permit; it does not prevent arrests for other lawful reasons. Employers should not assume refugee workers are exempt from immigration checks.
Why refugees aren’t ‘migrant workers’
Uganda’s Employment (Amendment) Act, updated this year, gives the Labour Minister powers to reserve certain jobs for citizens and restrict ‘migrant workers’ from designated occupations. The court noted that refugees do not fit that category.
The Act defines a migrant worker as someone who migrates for employment. Refugees, by contrast, enter Uganda seeking protection from persecution and receive the right to work through recognised refugee status, not as migrant workers.
The distinction shields recognised refugees from a protectionist current aimed at foreign workers generally, and echoes a broader continental push.
At an International Labour Organisation forum in Nairobi in late July, officials from Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda agreed to stop treating refugees and host communities as separate labour-market categories and to build inclusive national employment policies that cover both.
Uganda’s ruling gives that regional commitment concrete legal teeth through a court order, not merely a communiqué.
None of this guarantees smooth implementation. Ugandan immigration enforcement has lagged behind judicial pronouncements, just as Kenya’s reforms have struggled to turn legislative promise into permits issued.
The ruling also leaves asylum seekers, arguably those most vulnerable to arrest, in murkier territory. As the TASLAF team observes, successful enforcement of rights depends not only on the law but on the quality of evidence presented before court.
Still, for urban refugees in Uganda who work informally or semi-formally, and for employers who hire them, the Kasajja Brian ruling offers a workable rule: recognised refugee status, evidenced by a valid Refugee Identity Card, carries the right to earn a living without a separate work permit.