Thandi Magudumana’s legal battle against her extradition is far from over, and her latest move — taking her fight all the way to the Constitutional Court — is set to put serious pressure on how South African authorities handle cross-border arrests. The case has exposed deep legal tensions around international fugitive transfers, and it’s one that legal experts say could reshape the rules of engagement between South Africa and its continental neighbours.
Magudumana had already tested the waters at the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) in 2025, but that bid failed. The SCA dismissed her application after finding she had not demonstrated that the police acted unlawfully in securing her return to South Africa. The court sided with the South African Police Service (SAPS), accepting their account that she was not arrested by South African officers on Tanzanian soil — but rather by Tanzanian authorities, who detained her for breaching local immigration laws.
According to the SCA’s findings, SAPS only formally arrested Magudumana and her co-accused once they had landed back on South African soil. On the surface, that framing appeared to give the transfer a veneer of legal respectability — but not everyone on the bench agreed.
SCA Justice Tati Moffat Makgoka filed a dissenting judgment that has since become the foundation of Magudumana’s Constitutional Court challenge. Makgoka took direct aim at the handover process — specifically, the moment Tanzanian police transferred Magudumana into the custody of South African authorities. The Department of Home Affairs has maintained that this handover was permissible under a bilateral agreement between the two countries.
Magudumana’s Constitutional Court Challenge Questions the Legality of Cross-Border Fugitive Handovers
Makgoka wasn’t buying it. In his dissent, the justice made clear that no recognised international law procedure exists that allows a fugitive to simply be handed over from one country’s police to another’s without proper extradition processes being followed. He went further, stating that the bilateral agreement invoked by Home Affairs was itself unlawful — a striking finding that directly contradicts the state’s justification for how Magudumana was brought back to South Africa.
It’s that dissenting judgment that Magudumana is now leaning on as she approaches the Constitutional Court, seeking a declaration that her arrest was unconstitutional and unlawful. Her legal team’s argument is essentially that the state circumvented formal extradition procedures by engineering a workaround through Tanzania — one that, according to Justice Makgoka, had no basis in law.
The stakes here extend well beyond Magudumana’s personal circumstances. A successful Constitutional Court ruling in her favour could force South Africa to revisit how it conducts informal transfers with foreign governments, and whether bilateral agreements can substitute for the formal extradition framework that international law demands.
Home Affairs and SAPS will almost certainly push back hard, arguing that the SCA majority’s findings should stand and that the state acted in good faith under an existing agreement. But the very fact that a senior SCA justice broke ranks in such emphatic terms gives Magudumana’s case a credibility that can’t easily be dismissed.
As we continue to follow this matter, it’s worth noting that the Constitutional Court doesn’t take on cases lightly — the applicant must demonstrate that a genuine constitutional issue is at stake. Given Justice Makgoka’s dissent, Magudumana appears to have exactly that. Whether the court agrees to hear the case in full remains to be seen, but the questions it raises — about state power, due process, and international law — are exactly the kind the apex court was designed to answer.