Dr Wouter Basson, who headed the previous Defence Force’s chemical warfare section, was found guilt of unprofessional conduct by the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA) today.
“In the light of all the circumstances, the breaches amount to unprofessional conduct… the respondent is guilty of unprofessional conduct,” HPCSA professional conduct committee chairman Prof Jannie Hugo said in Pretoria.
The ruling by the council comes after protracted attempts to prosecute Basson for his role in South Africa’s chemical warfare defense initiatives. Basson has maintained throughout that the previous government had developed a defensive capability in the face of chemical weapons being used by the Soviet Union, East German, Cuba and other Warsaw Pact nations during the Angolan war.
However, Prof. Jannie Hugo said that Basson “had contravened international protocals and conventions. The respondent confused ethics of a doctor with that of a soldier while discharging his duties. A doctor cannot rely on military orders to escape the consequences of his duties.”
In a protracted criminal court case which went on appeal to the Constitutional Court and cost the government R50 million, Basson was found not guilty of any offense.
Basson practises as a cardiologist in Cape Town where he is lauded by his patients. Depending on what sanctions the HPCSA is going to apply against him, he could lose the right to practise as a doctor. The body’s decision will be made known in 20 and 21 February 2014.
The Health Professionals’ Council of South Africa (HPCSA) has excluded court testimony from the TRC (Truth an Reconciliation Commission) against Wouter Basson, nicknamed by leftwingers as Apartheid’s “Doctor Death”.
Basson is said to have had the support of Nelson Mandela, however.
On Monday, Basson won another victory in yet another hearing against him. Previous evidence which Basson himself presented in his own defence would not be considered in this week’s new hearing into whether he upheld the ethical standards required of a doctor, the council decided on Monday.
Basson’s supporters claim that he has been unfairly treated and has suffered for long enough, arguing that it is time to abandon the witchhunt against the respected cardiologist.
The Health Professions Council of South Africa’s lengthy hearing into the conduct of Dr Wouter Basson, the former head of the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare programme, which is now in its third year, was supposed to test the ethical standards to which medical doctors, including military doctors, are held accountable.
If found guilty by the HPCSA, Basson’s enemies say he should be barred from practising as a doctor in South Africa. Basson owns a private cardiology practice in Durbanville near Cape Town.
A “specialist” in reconciliation has suggested – without irony – that if Basson is not scrapped from the council’s doctors’ role, he should be forced to serve in public hospitals in underresourced areas, where “knowledge such as his is scarce”.
According to the director of the University of the Witwatersrand’s Steve Biko centre for bioethics, Ames Dhai, however, South Africa’s Constitution will be reduced to a “mockery of human rights” if Basson is not found guilty of “gross professional misconduct”.
In a marathon criminal trial that ran from 1999 to 2002, Basson was acquitted of the many charges the state brought against him. The council’s hearing is the only remaining forum that may hold Basson to account for his actions as head of Project Coast, the apartheid chemical and biological weapons programme.
The judge in the criminal trial found that Basson was head of a programme that was both offensive and defensive, in other words its purpose was to develop defences against chemical and biological weapons and to develop (among other things) chemical crowd-control agents.
It was also revealed both at the TRC and Basson’s criminal trial that scientists working for the programme under his leadership developed chemical and biological assassination weapons.
Scientific records from the Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, the facilities where chemical and biological agents were tested on animals, showed that scientists there conducted many experiments on baboons, dogs and rats in an apparent search for substances that could kill without leaving any trace.
Basson says: “I closed this chapter of my life about 20 years ago and now work as a dedicated medical practitioner helping hundreds of thousands of patients. This case is politically motivated. I just wish I could get on with my life.”
A witness, former surgeon general Dr Niel Knobel, testified this month, after an United States medical ethics expert Steven Miles previously testified that Basson violated the laws of humanity and various World Medical Association declarations and regulations.
In contrast, Knobel said Basson was a soldier and not a doctor when he headed the country’s chemical and biological warfare programme.
Knobel disagreed with Miles’s view, that once someone was a doctor they remained a doctor and that Basson made use of his medical knowledge and skills when he headed the programme.
Basson argued the surgeon general at the time was in charge of the programme and that he carried out orders as a soldier. – Sapa/M&G
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