CAF moves to restore trust after AFCON final controversy with sweeping reforms:
The Confederation of African Football (CAF) has announced sweeping reforms to its statutes and regulations following controversy surrounding the final of the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations Final, a match that ultimately saw Senegal stripped of its Africa Cup of Nations title.
In a media briefing on Sunday after its executive committee meeting, CAF said it is implementing “far-reaching changes and improvements” aimed at restoring trust in its refereeing structures, including match officials, VAR operators and judicial bodies. The move comes in response to incidents during the AFCON final that raised serious concerns about officiating standards and decision-making processes.
“CAF is implementing changes and improvements to the CAF Statutes and Regulations that will strengthen the trust and confidence in CAF referees, VAR operators and judicial bodies,” the organisation said in a statement. It added that the reforms are specifically designed to ensure that “the incidents that took place at the final match… do not happen again.”
The governing body acknowledged that while refereeing performances at the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations were widely praised, the events in Morocco marked a setback. CAF now aims to restore the credibility and admiration that African officiating had begun to earn on the continental and global stage.
Central to the reforms is a renewed emphasis on the independence and integrity of CAF’s judicial structures. The organisation confirmed it will continue appointing highly respected African judges and legal experts to its disciplinary and appeal boards. These individuals are selected through a process involving CAF’s executive committee and general assembly, based on nominations from its 54 member associations and zonal unions.
CAF president Patrice Motsepe said the changes are being guided by both African and international legal expertise to ensure alignment with global football standards. “These changes will strengthen the trust and confidence in CAF referees, VAR operators, match commissioners and judicial bodies,” Motsepe said. “They will also ensure that the unacceptable incidences that took place… do not happen again.”
Motsepe added that CAF is working closely with FIFA to enhance the training of referees and VAR officials across the continent. He stressed the importance of professionalising these roles, including improving remuneration, to ensure African officials can compete with the best in the world.
The reforms also form part of a broader governance drive within CAF, which Motsepe said has made “significant progress” over the past five years. He reaffirmed the organisation’s zero-tolerance stance on corruption and improper conduct, noting that these efforts have helped attract new sponsors and partners.
Equally important, Motsepe emphasised CAF’s commitment to fairness among its member associations. “Under no circumstances will any member association be treated preferentially,” he said, underscoring the body’s intention to apply its rules consistently across the continent.
While the fallout from the AFCON final remains unresolved and with aspects of the matter now before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, CAF says its immediate focus is on stabilising and strengthening its competitions. These include the ongoing CAF Champions League and CAF Confederation Cup, as well as supporting African teams preparing for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
City Lodge bows out of Newtown:
The City Lodge Hotel in Newtown, Johannesburg, has closed after just over a decade of being in business and on 25 March Broll Auctions and Sales auctioned the building.
The property will be sold vacant, with the lease terminating at the end of May 2026.
On paper, nothing about the property sounds like a failure.
It was developed by Atterbury in 2015 at a cost of about R146 million. At the time of opening, the three-star hotel was the City Lodge Hotel Group’s first hotel in the Johannesburg CBD and the first big branded hotel to open in the city centre in more than two decades.
It has 148 rooms, a restaurant, two boardrooms, a gym, a pool and 55 basement parking bays.
The City Lodge group is hardly struggling. The brand has been operating for more than 40 years and runs nearly 60 hotels across South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Mozambique.
At the time of the opening, James Ehlers, the managing director of Atterbury Property Developments, said: “Newtown Junction’s hospitality offering has been upped significantly with the opening of the new City Lodge Hotel.
“The hotel, together with Newtown Junction’s exciting new restaurants and leisure offerings, elevates it as a hotspot in the CBD for shopping, business and tourists too.”
When asked about the closure, City Lodge said the decision not to renew the lease was unrelated to staff performance, the brand or the broader Johannesburg market.
Yet today, the reality is that the hotel stopped making money.
Respectfully, the area around the hotel is completely different from what it was in 2015 and so is the sentiment about the future of the precinct. The city has changed.
Over the past few years, I have spent a lot of time touring hotel developments, speaking to developers and operators and presenting on the state of the hospitality market in South Africa. One pattern keeps coming up in Johannesburg.
People fly into OR Tambo, the busiest airport on the continent but they are not staying in the CBD. They are not staying in the old regeneration zones either. They are going to Sandton, Rosebank, Melrose, Waterfall and Fourways. Johannesburg remains a business city before it is a leisure city.
That means hotel demand is driven by corporate travel, conferences, consulting teams, financiers, engineers, project managers and executives flying in and out for short stays. These are high-frequency travellers with high expectations and they choose convenience, security and reliability first. This is why we are not seeing a wave of new hotel construction in Johannesburg in the way we see in Cape Town.
Instead of building more, operators are refining what exists. They are upgrading, repositioning or walking away from locations that no longer work.
Newtown is a good example of how fast a node can rise and fall. With so many developers and stakeholders driving the urban regeneration of the precinct, it is sad to see the vision not succeed.
There was a time when Newtown was spoken about as the future cultural heart of Johannesburg. The precinct received major public investment. There were theatres, museums, offices, student housing and big plans for urban revival. A hotel in that location made perfect sense at the time. But cities do not stand still and neither do travellers.
Today, most visitors want to be close to major business nodes, shopping centres, medical facilities and transport routes. They want predictable power, working traffic lights, visible security and walkable environments.
Whether we like it or not, those boxes are easier to tick in Rosebank than in parts of the inner city. The changes have changed where hotels will survive.
The closure of City Lodge Newtown is not an isolated event. It forms part of a broader reshaping of Johannesburg’s hospitality map. We are seeing similar signals in other sectors too.
Another luxury iconic closure not too far from this hotel was the landmark BMW, which closed at the end of February 2024.
Legacy Motor Group, which operated the dealership, said the location was no longer financially viable due to market conditions and operational challenges.
When a premium brand leaves a historic CBD site, it usually points to deeper issues — foot traffic, security, customer base and infrastructure stability all play a role.
High-end operators leaving often means property values follow.
The market is consolidating around fewer, stronger nodes, while older precincts that once held promise are struggling to keep up with what visitors, tenants and investors now expect as standard. And this is the part we should be paying attention to.
Hotels are one of the clearest indicators of how a city is really doing. Developers do not build them unless they believe people will come and operators do not stay unless the numbers work.
When hotels start closing in one area and opening or being renovated in another, it tells you exactly where confidence is moving.
The uncomfortable question is not why this hotel failed.
It is why, in a city that should be the economic engine of the continent, so much of the investment keeps moving further and further away from the centre?
On 25 February 2026, the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a sweeping and uncompromising judgment condemning the US government’s policy of deporting immigrants to so-called “third countries” (states with which they have no meaningful connection).
By the time the ruling was handed down, individuals had been removed, without meaningful notice or due process, to destinations including Eswatini, raising urgent constitutional and international law concerns.
The March 2025 ‘Third Country Removal’ guidance: ‘Not fine, nor legal’
In forceful language, Judge Murphy opened the judgment by rejecting the government’s position in stark terms: “The department of homeland security has adopted a policy whereby it may take people and drop them off in parts unknown — in so-called ‘third countries’— and ‘as long as the department doesn’t already know that there’s someone standing there waiting to shoot … that’s fine’. It is not fine, nor is it legal.”
The state argued that discretionary executive actions in immigration matters fell beyond judicial review.
The court disagreed emphatically: “It is not within the ‘discretion’ of the executive to exceed the scope of its authority or otherwise violate the law.” At the heart of the ruling was a simple constitutional principle: no “person” within the US may be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.
The court found that the liberty interests at stake were profound and that the risk of erroneous deprivation and exposure to torture or persecution was unacceptably high.
The case centres on a March 2025 directive titled “Guidance Regarding Third Country Removal”, issued by the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem.
Under the policy, individuals could be deported to a third country if that country provided “diplomatic assurances” against torture or persecution. No further procedures were deemed necessary.
Authorities would “not affirmatively ask” whether the individual feared removal to the designated country and the notice of removal could be as short as 24 hours.
In April 2025, a federal court certified a class of individuals at risk under the policy and ordered that they receive written notice of the intended country of removal and a meaningful opportunity to raise claims under the UN Convention Against Torture.
Yet the February 2026 judgment records repeated violations of the order. The court found that the government had little interest in the judicial process: the state repeatedly provided misleading or false information; misstated applicable law and jurisprudence; reissued the contested policy despite prior judicial findings and attempted to evade court oversight by using agencies other than the Department of Homeland Security to execute removals.
The impossibility of due process in practice
The US District Court underscored a contradiction in the policy. If individuals are not told where they are being sent or are informed only hours before removal, how can they meaningfully raise fears of persecution or torture specific to that country?
The risks are not theoretical. Evidence before the court described removals to South Sudan, Cameroon and Djibouti, during which detainees were denied access to family members and legal representatives.
The danger of chain refoulement, where a third country subsequently deports a person to the state they feared, was also realised.
A plaintiff before the court, who had survived sexual violence in Mexico and Guatemala, raised fears regarding removal to both countries. He was nevertheless transported to Mexico and from there, deported onward to Guatemala.
Such outcomes contradict the protections embedded in the Convention Against Torture.
Deportations to Eswatini
By July 2025, despite multiple court orders, the department of homeland security reissued the March policy.
Within days, a plane carrying five deportees landed in Eswatini. By October 2026, the number had grown to 15, with one person later repatriated to his home country.
A confidential agreement between the US and Eswatini reportedly permitted the staggered transfer of up to 160 immigrants.
Local civil society organisations and concerned citizens challenged the legality of the agreement before the Eswatini High Court.
The deportees themselves could not join the case: they were detained in facilities that denied them access to legal counsel.
The Eswatini high court’s response
Applicants argued that the agreement was unlawful and irrational, required parliamentary approval because it concerned a matter of national importance and rendered Eswatini complicit in violations of international and regional law.
In early February 2026, the Eswatini high court declined to treat the matter as urgent. While acknowledging the presence of US deportees, it found that the application lacked a sufficient factual basis and that the applicants lacked standing because they had no direct personal interest.
In this respect, the court ignored the importance of allowing citizens to seek judicial review of executive actions that appear to be unlawful and unconstitutional.
A broad understanding of legal standing to access courts is especially important in instances where the state avoids parliamentary accountability.
The applicants have appealed the decision. The practical consequences of such judgments can be severe: those affected cannot access lawyers; those able to access the courts are denied standing. Thus, such agreements and the detentions flowing from them remain insulated from judicial scrutiny.
Challenges in holding states to account
The US federal court’s February 2026 judgment underscores the gravity of the due process violations at issue and the importance of judicial review of executive decisions. Yet enforcement remains fraught.
Individuals are removed on short notice, without clarity about their destination, leaving no realistic opportunity to seek relief before deportation. Once abroad, they are detained without access to counsel, rendering legal challenges in either jurisdiction nearly impossible.
At a broader level, the use of confidential memorandums of understanding to facilitate third-country removals appears designed to circumvent meaningful congressional and parliamentary oversight.
Such arrangements are increasingly common not only in relation to migration but also in other domains, including public health and strategic resource access.
When courts narrow standing rules or decline urgency in matters implicating constitutional governance and human rights, the effect is to shield executive action from scrutiny.
The cumulative result is a widening accountability gap, where executive policy declared unlawful in one jurisdiction continues to operate in practice, while receiving states decline to interrogate their own role in its implementation.
The Massachusetts judgment reaffirms a foundational proposition: constitutional guarantees and international human rights obligations do not evaporate at the border, nor at the whim of executive policy.
Whether that principle will be realised in practice depends not only on courts’ willingness to articulate it but also on their readiness, across jurisdictions, to enforce it.
Anneke Meerkotter is an executive director of the Southern Africa Litigation Centre
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