02 Jun 2006: ISS Today: South Africa - Home Affairs to Appeal Khalid Orders

02 June 2006: South Africa: Home Affairs to Appeal Khalid Orders
IAFRICA.COM

The South African Department of Home Affairs is to appeal against a court order compelling it to supply detailed information about the deportation of Pakistani national Rashid Khalid.

The department had until Monday afternoon to supply the information, but instead it noted its intention to ask for leave to appeal against it. Khalid has been missing since November last year, when he was apprehended in KwaZulu-Natal and detained. He admitted that he was in the country illegally. Home Affairs said he was legally deported back to Pakistan, while Khalid’s family fears that he was handed over to foreign officials on suspicions that he was a terrorist.

Commentary

Until such time that Rashid Khalid’s family, lawyer and the greater South African public are informed of his whereabouts, any comments are based on conjecture. The details of Khalid’s alleged deportation are at best sketchy. What makes the situation worse is the inability or plain refusal of the involved departments to play open cards. This would not be the first case of irregular action on behalf of the South African government as regards extradition and deportation proceedings of alleged terror suspects.

In the case of Tanzanian national Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, who was sought for the US bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the Constitutional Court found that South Africa had violated his rights (1). Mohamed was sent to the US without an extradition hearing being held. There he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Back then, Mohamed should have been deported to his country of origin, namely Tanzania. An extradition hearing should have been initiated for crimes that he was alleged to have committed in the US (2). The Mohamed case demonstrated that there was a distinct difference between extradition and deportation; furthermore the Constitutional Court ruled that it was unlawful to use deportation procedures to affect an extradition.

It remains unclear whether Khalid was an illegal immigrant, a terror suspect or perhaps a wrongly-identified terror suspect. The silence on this matter seems to point to the latter two options. Perhaps even a case of rendition?

Human rights watchdogs have long criticised the practice of rendition, which has become a cornerstone of the ‘War on Terror’. Rendition usually involves the capture and movement of alleged terror suspects to US-friendly countries, where mostly local interrogators use torture and other unsound practices to extract information.

Presently, one can only hope that Khalid has not been a victim of rendition. Worrying about renditions are not only the means and ends, but a history of so-called ‘erroneous renditions’.

The case of Khaled Masri, an unemployed father of five living in the German city of Ulm caused a worldwide outcry. Masri was taken off a bus at the Macedonian border because his name was similar to that of an associate of a 9//11 hijacker. He then was detained and flown to a CIA prison in Afghanistan, where he was tortured and interrogated for the next five months (3). The case of Masri and others have shown that quite a few terror detentions are based on thin or speculative evidence. Of course, correcting such errors of judgment may be very complicated for agencies and departments that operate in secret.

The Department of Home Affairs, Justice and Safety and Security, the South African Police Service, the National Intelligence Agency and a ‘foreign secret service’ could diffuse the situation. More than six months have passed since his alleged deportation. The important and justifiable desire of states to co-operate on the combating of terrorism should not allow them to act unlawfully. South Africa should ensure that it never violates the inalienable rights of persons, even indirectly, to bring alleged terrorists to justice.

Since Zehir Omar, Khalid’s lawyer, has threatened to take the South African government to the International Criminal Court (ICC), it would seem prudent to reveal Khalid’s whereabouts as soon as possible. Further court orders only raise the levels of suspicion.Â

Annette HÃ¼bschle

1. For a comprehensive case study on the Mohamed case, the essay “Rights versus Justice: Issues around extradition and deportation in transnational terrorist cases”
(https://www.issafrica.org/dynamic/administration/file_manager/file_links/ASR14NO4EBANDA.PDF?link_id=3&slink_id=1145&link_type=12&slink_type=13&tmpl_id=3) is highly recommended.

2. http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=79&art_id=vn20060520115212610C483314&set_id=1

3. Dana Priest, “Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake”, The Washington Post , http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/03/AR2005120301476_pf.html, accessed on 31 May 2006