OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Monday 12.00pm
LAST apartheid president F.W. De Klerk’s challenge to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) will get a brief airing in the Cape High Court on Tuesday, his lawyer said.
De Klerk will not have to appear and the matter will immediately be postponed to a date still to be agreed upon, lawyer Callie Albertyn said on Monday.
The former president took legal action to block the TRC from implicating him in state-sponsored terrorism in its report on apartheid-era human rights abuses which it handed to President Nelson Mandela in October.
TRC chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu said at the time the commission’s lawyers would mount a vigorous defence in court of why De Klerk should be named in a complete version of the report due later this year.
Press reports have said the TRC report would finger De Klerk as “an accessory after the fact” to the 1980s bombings of the offices of two anti-apartheid organisations.
South Africa’s last white president has denied any involvement in assassinations, torture and other abuses committed by the previous government’s security forces and has not applied to the TRC for amnesty for any apartheid-era crimes. — AFP