Parliament addresses plight of prisoners

The Portfolio Committee on International Relations & Co-operation has resolved to take up the cause of two SA engineers incarcerated in Equatorial Guinea on ‘trumped up, fake drug charges’. As previously reported in Legalbrief Today, Frik Potgieter and Peter Huxham have been imprisoned in Equatorial Guinea since February 2023. News24 reports that they had been working for Dutch oil and gas company SBM Offshore. Days before their arrest, SA authorities seized a luxury super yacht of Vice-President Teddy Mangue, following the earlier seizures of his two houses in Bishops Court and Clifton. Mangue's father – Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo – has been Equatorial Guinea's dictatorial President since 1979. After a trial that has since been discredited by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, they were sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment. Die Burger reports that former Dirco Minister Naledi Pandor visited the country on 5 May, but the families say they received no feedback. 

The Portfolio Committee on International Relations & Co-operation last week considered its agenda. With Potgieter's wife, Sonja Potgieter, and Huxham's life partner, Kathy McConnachie, in attendance, the DA's Emma Powell proposed that the committee resolve to call International Relations & Co-operation Minister Ronald Lamola to account to the committee on his department's attempts to assist Potgieter and Huxham. News24 notes that Powell told the committee that Huxham and Potgieter had been sitting in ‘one of the most notorious prisons’ on the continent for more than 550 days, ‘with virtually no assistance or visits from the SA consulate and very, very limited contact with their families’. She described the charges against Potgieter and Huxham as ‘trumped up, fake drug charges’ and said they were now ‘subject to a diplomatic battle between SA, the UK (Huxham holds duel citizenship) and Equatorial Guinea’. ‘What this is really about, is the seizure of a superyacht, a luxury superyacht that belongs to Equatorial Guinea's Vice-President, as well as the seizure of the Vice-President's two properties in Cape Town a few months earlier,’ said Powell. The chairperson of the committee, the ANC's Supra Mahumapelo, said his office would write to Lamola. ‘We hope that it can get urgent attention because, as SA, we are part of Africa and we do business on the African continent and the rest of the world. And we should be made to feel safe wherever we are on the African continent where we do business.’ 

Full report in Die Burger (subscription needed)

Full News24 report