An application from South African Communist Party (SACP) leader Chris Hani’s widow, Limpho, to rescind the order of the Constitutional Court ordering Hani’s assassin Janusz Walus to be placed on parole has been dismissed by the court, APA learnt on Saturday.
Responding to the application, the court said it had considered the presentation and concluded that it should be dismissed because the applicants failed to make out a case for rescission or reconsideration.
The fact that Walus never made full disclosure before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was not one of the factors that needed to be taken into account in terms of the ministry of correctional services’ policy, or the Correctional Services Act, in determining whether parole should be granted or not, the court said.
Hani’s widow application, made last week alongside the SACP’s, argued for the rescinding of the order because the apex court’s judgment “omitted to deal with the applicants’ submissions or did not fully engage or examine or inquire into and/or analyse and/or fully consider the applicants’ written submissions filed in this court.”
The applicants’ also claimed the court made “a patent error in that it did not fully evaluate or analyse or examine the applicants’ submissions in view of the first respondent’s submissions.
”Polish national Walus was released on a two-year parole on Wednesday after serving 30 years of his life sentence for gunning down Hani, the SACP’s secretary general, outside his Johannesburg home in 1993.
Hani’s assassination, on the eve of the country’s new political dispensation, nearly derailed the peaceful process.
With the Constitutional Court’s ruling, as the highest court of the land, the options may now be limited for the applicants to continue with the case in any court of law.
NM/as/APA