TRC Final Report

Volume 6

Section 5

Chapter 5

Subsection 8

Applications refused

87. The Committee received a number of amnesty applications from persons in custody, which it refused either on the grounds that the incidents were not politically motivated or on grounds of lack of full disclosure. In most of these incidents, the applicants remain in custody serving sentences.

88. The leaders of the PAC maintain that a number of their cadres are languishing in apartheid jails and that special arrangements should be made to pardon them. At a parliamentary briefing after the debate on the Commission’s report, Dr Stanley Mogoba, the President of the PAC, made a call to the State President to pardon ‘the many freedom fighters who are still languishing in our prisons’.

Now that the TRC work is finished – or is about to be finished – it is time, perhaps, to call on our President, perhaps as a farewell gift or gesture, to give Presidential pardon to these prisoners from the liberation struggle. Many grieving families would be eternally grateful to our President for that. I also want to say that this argument and this discussion must be separated from the discussion on general amnesty. I am not talking about general amnesty.

DIFFICULTIES EXPERIENCED BY PAC APPLICANTS

89. It is important for the Commission to acknowledge the great difficulty that the PAC/APLA cadres experienced in filing proper amnesty applications. They were hampered by the fact that, at the time, the Legal Aid Board appointed inadequate Counsel to assist them. In many instances, counsel did not bother to read the Commission’s founding Act or endeavour to understand it. It was only after legal practitioners such as Mr Bandazaya were appointed that these applicants began to be properly represented.

90. There is no doubt that a number of people still in custody did not apply for amnesty for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they were not properly advised. The government will need to consider this issue from a humanitarian point of view. It is commendable that the President of the PAC does not consider that another amnesty deal should follow.

Pardons

91. Recently the President pardoned a number of PAC amnesty applicants who had been denied amnesty by the Committee. This decision was widely criticised by civil society and victims, as the pardons were perceived to be a ploy to grant amnesty using the ‘presidential pardon’ process. There has been a demand fro m civil society that the President explain why he took this decision, as the use of the presidential pardon to grant amnesty is seen as undermining the work of the Commission whose mandate it was to grant amnesty on an accountable basis.

CONCLUSION

92. The evidence that emerged from the hearings of the Amnesty Committee did not lead to any alteration in the findings of the Commission as recorded in the Final Report.