No transit visa required for UK for South African passport holders (sometimes)
Hi All
I’m a South African passport holder. Recently, we’ve been required to get a British to visit or transit the UK even if we’re just passing through the airport for an hour to change planes and not going through immigration, or so the story goes. Getting this visa can be a pain in the neck and very expensive.
I recently spent some time on the UK Border Agency website, which is confusing — it seemed there is a concession granted to certain people transiting the UK who are in possession of a valid US, Canadian, Australian or New Zealand visa.
After emailing the (beyond) hopeless private company that handles UK visa applications to ask for advice and receiving an enormously long reply that consisted of cut-and-pasted, contradictory excerpts from what seemed like immigration officer training manuals, I emailed the UK Border Agency themselves.
It seems I CAN transit the UK without holding a UK visa — if I have a valid US one — at the discretion of the immigration officer on duty. (This is not a right of transit without a visa and is subject to various conditions and I do not take responsibility for anything that happens to you, the reader, while trying to transit Heathrow without a visa.)
See exchange below, initiated by me from a web form:
From: adamw…
Sent: 16 November 2009 3:05 PM
To: Public Visa Enqs
Subject: Ref: VCS88990: General information
Page used to send this email:
Your enquiries
[http://www.ukvisas.gov.uk/en/aboutus/enquiries/contactus]
Full name:
Adam Sebastian Welz
Email address:
adamw…
Nationality of traveller:
South Africa
Where are you?
United States
Subject:
Dear UK Border Agency
I have made a request for rule clarification (Case Number 00266921) from
your private partner, WorldBridge Services, and received a totally
incomprehensible and contradictory response, hence this email.
I am a South African citizen and passport holder. I need to transit
Heathrow (on the airside, without entering the UK) while travelling from
Europe back home to South Africa in January 2010.
My current UK visitors’ visa expires in December 2009.
Your webpage
http://www.ukvisas.gov.uk/en/doineedvisa/visadatvnationals
says, under the heading “Passengers exempt from the DATV requirement”,
that “Holders of certain documents are, REGARDLESS OF NATIONALITY,
exempt from the requirement to hold a Direct Airside Transit Visa when
transiting the UK.”
One of the documents listed as providing for this exemption is a valid
US visa when travelling from the US to another country.
I hold a multiple-entry US visa valid until 2012 and am travelling from
the USA to South Africa via Europe (I will pass through Heathrow after
being in Europe to get back to South Africa).
Do I still need a Direct Airside Transit Visa?
Regards
Adam Welz
REPLY:
Public Visa Enqs
to adamw…
date Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 1:10 PM
subject RE: VCS88990: General information
Thank you for this enquiry.
No visa is needed if :
- the passenger is genuinely in transit; and
- there is no intention to stay more than 24 hours in the UK; and
- the traveller holds a confirmed booking on an onward flight from the
UK; and
- the traveller has a valid visa for the country of next destination
(where required by the laws of that country).
In these circumstances, the traveller may be allowed into the UK without
a visa under the Transit Without Visa (TWOV) concession. This concession
allows the traveller to depart from a different airport within the UK to
that of arrival and also to stay overnight away from the airport if
necessary.
But the following are unlikely to be granted the concession:
- A person who has been refused entry to the United Kingdom;
- A person who has been deported or otherwise removed from the United
Kingdom;
- A person who has been served with a notice of deportation or removal
from the UK, but left before such action was taken;
- A person who has illegally overstayed or otherwise breached UK
immigration conditions, e.g. worked illegally; or
- A person who has been warned to obtain a visa on their next journey to
the UK by an official of the UK Immigration Service.
For more information, please see Guidance Note INF 20 on our website at
www.ukvisas.gov.uk/en/howtoapply/infs/inf20transit
Sent by:
Public Enquiries [I], Visa Customer Services,
Visa Services Directorate, International Group UKBA,
c/o Lunar House, 40 Wellesley Road, Croydon CR9 2BY, England
Web-site: www.ukvisas.gov.uk
***
I look forward to hearing about other SA passport holders’ recent experiences of transiting the UK from the US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand.
Cheers
Adam
Great Egret, Cape May NJ, 4 October 2009
I was standing on the hawkwatch platform near the lighthouse at Cape May, New Jersey, a few days ago, when this bird emerged out of the fog — a Great White Egret, from the Great Whiteout. There were no migrating raptors about.
(*I grew up calling this bird the Great White Egret. Now most people just call it the Great Egret, Ardea alba.)
Strange Feathered Fruit – Secretary Bird, Kruger Park, 2007
Hi All
another record image from the archives, this a grab shot of a Secretary Bird (Sagittarius serpentarius) that appeared suddenly next to my car while on a trip through the Kruger National Park in South Africa in 2007. These increasingly rare raptors never cease to amaze me — they have the head of an eagle with an American Indian headdress, the legs and body of a stork, the talons of a hawk and an appetite to match. They prefer to hunt by walking kilometres across the African veld, stamping small rodents and reptiles to death when they find them, although they’re adept at soaring high on midday thermals when the need arises.
The largest, most forgotten woodpecker? A photo-ghost of Campephilus imperialis
Hi All
most birders are aware of the recent claimed ‘rediscovery’ of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the US, which had been thought extinct for some decades. Millions of dollars have been spent to track down the last remaining Ivory-bills and conserve what are thought to be their last habitats.
Far fewer birders know that in Mexico, just south of the US border, the largest woodpecker in the world has been allowed to slip into probable extinction almost without a murmur. There are credible sightings of Imperial Woodpecker from as recently as the 1980s and their original natural range was far larger than that of the Ivory-billed — thus making them better candidates, in my view, for conservation expenditure. But few people have gone to try to find the last Imperials, if they exist, and the big bird conservation organisations hardly ever mention it.
A cynic would say that this is because it’s harder to raise conservation dollars in Mexico, and perhaps a bit tougher to work there. I hope there are better reasons for this comparative neglect.
During a quick visit to the Natural History Museum Vienna, in Austria, in 2007 I was stopped in my tracks by this old mounted specimen in a glass case, doubtless shot by an early collector for a few dollars and casually stuffed and stuck on a post by one of the museum’s taxidermists. No sign told visitors that this was the globe’s largest woodpecker, and that it was probably extinct. It was just arranged in the case along with a whole lot of other old, ratty mounted birds.
How many other amazing birds, like the Spoon-billed Sandpiper, are we likely to lose in our lifetimes?
Committee’s Drift, Eastern Cape, South Africa, 27 April 1994
From my vault — here’s my favourite image from South Africa’s first democratic election back in 1994. This was my first ‘real’, i.e. commissioned and paid, job as a pro photographer. I was in the last year of my BSc at Rhodes University, and I leapt at the chance to be one of the 8 official Independent Electoral Commission photographers. I had an all-access pass and an earth-shaking (for me at the time, anyway) 20 rolls of Ilford HP5+ and Kodak TMax 100 to put through my Nikon FM2. My job was to cover remote areas of the Eastern Cape. Since there was so little infrastructure, many of the voting places were in tents erected by the army at crossroads seemingly in the middle of nowhere. But that did not stop the people coming. At Committee’s Drift I watched people come in to vote from miles away, walking through the veld from small villages over the horizon. Most were decked out in their Sunday best, formally attired for a day that most of us never expected to see.
Notwithstanding the modest circumstances in which voting took place (the wind often tried to carry the voting tent away during the hours I spent there) the Presiding Officer took his job extremely seriously and insisted that all proper protocol be followed. Everyone had to stand quietly in the correct lines and have their ID book scrupulously checked, and I had to present my credentials and explain myself fully before being allowed to photograph.
Here’s an ID book-weilding voter heading towards the tent to mark an ‘x’ on a meaningful ballot paper for the first time in his life.
I was extremely glad for TMax 100’s ability to hold about 14 zones of detail in the neg. Because it was so hard to block out, i.e. completely overexpose, the highlights, I managed to hold detail in the very bright part of the sky. The print was a challenge, to say the least!
Cheers
Adam
Ring-billed Gull and Herring Gull, Popham Beach, Maine, 8 Aug 2009
I’m slowly accumulating clear record shots of North American birds. Here are a couple of gulls that are common in the northeastern USA — but rare vagrants back in South Africa!
Ring-billed Gull (Larus delawarensis), Popham Beach, Maine, USA, 8 August 2009
Herring Gull (Larus argentatus), Popham Beach, Maine, USA, 8 Aug 2009
1 comment