Open Letter to Shadow Minister of Correctional Services re: Eugene de Kock

Shadow Minister of Correctional Services, Mr J Selfe

Eugene de Kock

Honourable Shadow Minister of Correctional Services, Mr Selfe,

As the situation regarding the neglect from the various departments or committees of the Department of Correctional Services has already been disseminated to you, I merely copy and paste the most important aspects.

I am the Whistle Blower!! No member of the Correctional Services or Justice Department need to be implicated. I am the Whistle Blower and you are free to use my name. I am sure that you can remember my telephone calls and emails to you about Eugene before...when I asked you about the DA stance on Presidential Pardons.

At the time, you promised that you would take the matter of Eugene de Kock's parole up with the Minister but I did not receive any feedback. In fact, Ben Kruger is another concerned person who you had correspondence with via email. (A new Minister has been installed since). I am very disappointed that you did not familiarise yourself with the facts of the case so that you could have shadowed this high profile case properly.

According to our constitution, we are all equal before the law. Why is the case of Eugene becoming a political soccer ball? He is an ordinary prisoner and not a political prisoner. The two concepts are mutually exclusive. Either he is a political prisoner and politics need to be taken into account, or he is an ordinary prisoner and the letter of the law has to be followed by all government departments and citizens of SA.

You should be well conversant with the working performances of the CMC and that the main function of this committee is namely the preparing of absolute completed profiles of offenders who qualifies for parole, and to be submitted to the CSPB. Documents that is very important to this case can be delivered directly to you.

---the denial of the parole to EdK, as announced by the Minister of Correctional Services , involved simply about the fact that EdK did not consult with the families of the victims ;
---the VOD (Victim Offender Dialogue P rogramme) was invented and launched by the DCS, for the mere fact that offenders and victims or families (if they agreed to meet with the offender ) ;

---this VOD programme (violence/violent, crimes committed as in the case of EdK) was a prerequisite to accompany profiles of offenders of such crimes, with a clear recommendation for the parties to meet and if not, what reasons are there for it not to have been metnot have met. If this or any other relevant documents were not attached to the profile as the prescribed norm requires, it simply means that the profile was incompetent;

I came to the following conclusions, namely :
---the VOD programme was never applied to in the case of EdK, and this is why the mentioned Minister had no other choice to announce a further profile to be submitted in the next 12 months;
---this announcement cleary indicates the following :
1) the Minister was not aware of the VOD process that should have accompanied the profile as a competed document;
2) National CSPB, Senior officials of the DCS as well as the acting Commissioner of DCS , were absolutely negligent in the preparation and submitted an uncompleted profile to their Minister , which left the Minister no other choice than to announce a further profile, in order to give these mentioned parties of DCS a chance to correct their wrong submission of a well completed profile that meets with prescribed standards .
Honourable Mr Selfe , Eugene de Kock all the standards to be released immediately on parole .

DCS officials who were involved with the preparations of his parole applcation were gross negligent and must be brought forward to explain why the correct procedures were not followed, prior the profile was submitted to their Minister.

Mr Selfe, it is a crying shame that a prisoner has to go to a supreme court to have his rights applied, not only once, but twice to my knowledge.

Would you kindly ask the relevant questions in parliament and use my name as the Whistle Blower. I have been instrumental in start a highly popular FaceBook group called FREE EUGENE DE KOCK. We have a few thousand members and would welcome it for you to join and see for yourself what the people thing about his release. You will be pleasantly surprised to see the type of people who have become members, people from all racial, cultural, and religious groups. The group would like to see this man being given a Presidential Pardon, and we will persevere until we get it for Eugene.

However, parole for someone who meets all the legal requirements should not be side-lined for anything; political or incompetence included.

I look forward to your earliest response in this regard.

Yours truly

Dianne Lang