The Cape Town council said on Thursday it had filed papers in the Western Cape High Court opposing the South African Human Rights Commission’s (SAHRC) application to interdict it from carrying out land evictions.

The council has come under criticism recently after a video of Cape Town law enforcement officials dragging a naked man while evicting him from a shack constructed on illegally occupied land went viral on social media.

At the time, Cape Town mayor Dan Plato called the treatment of Bulelani Qholani shameful and said the city council had immediately suspended the four officers, but also insisted municipalities had a duty by law to prevent illegal land invasions.

On Thursday, Plato said his council would stand up for residents impacted by such invasions.

"The rights of people impacted by illegal land invasion have seemingly been forgotten by the Human Rights Commission, but these residents can rest assured their city will stand up for them," he said.

"Land invasions derail housing and service projects, lead to the pollution of waterways, severely prejudice deserving housing beneficiaries, and cause property owners to lose their investments over night."

The SAHRC has repeatedly called on South Africans to refrain from unlawful land invasions, but says evictions, demolitions of illegal dwellings and the removal of people from such land should be conducted within the limits of human rights as set out in the Constitution.

It is seeking to interdict evictions during the current Covid-19 crisis, saying that doing so is a breach of the Disaster Management Act.

In its papers opposing the SAHRC application, the Cape Town council says there is no right in law which prohibits a landowner from demolishing or removing an unlawfully erected unoccupied structure from their land.

"Similarly, there is no right in law to unlawfully occupy the property of another," the papers state, adding that the SAHRC’s application would, in effect, cause every unoccupied illegal structure to be treated as a home, unless proven otherwise.

The South African Police Service is also opposing the rights commission's application, calling it “misguided, fundamentally flawed, and constitutes an abuse of this court’s processes”.