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.
A former SA Defence Force surgeon general has refused to divulge details of meetings and discussions he had with former president Nelson Mandela.
Dr Niel Knobel told Wouter Basson’s unethical conduct hearing at the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) on Wednesday there was information he could not disclose as it was top secret.
“I may not refer to documents that are top secret and that could jeopardise South Africa’s position internationally, as well as compromise … Mandela.
“Please understand my position as an officer who retains my ranks until the day I die and my commission stands. I am not going to jeopardise it and I’m certainly not going to make any remarks about [former] president Mandela,” Knobel said.
The council’s professional conduct committee is holding a hearing into allegations of unethical conduct against Basson, a Cape Town cardiologist.
Earlier, Knobel said he had meetings with Mandela and noted there was a lot of interest among the South African Defence Force (SADF) members when he returned from the meetings, wanting to know what they had discussed.
An affidavit made by Knobel during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission proceedings was presented before the committee.
The affidavit is a statement regarding the chronology of events around the SADF’s chemical and biological weapons programme, with special reference to Basson’s role.
Cross-border kidnappings
Knobel argued that he could not give evidence on the affidavit as some of the appendices which were supposed to be attached to it were not available.
The charges against Basson arise from his involvement in the apartheid government’s chemical and biological warfare programme in the 1980s and early 1990s.
He is accused of acting unethically by being involved in the large-scale production of Mandrax, cocaine and teargas, of weaponising teargas, and of supplying it to Angola’s Unita rebels leader Jonas Savimbi.
Basson is also accused of acting unethically by providing disorientating substances for cross-border kidnappings, and making cyanide capsules available for distribution to operatives for use in committing suicide.
In 2002, Basson was acquitted by the North Gauteng High Court of criminal charges arising from his conduct.
The HPCSA reviewed the judgment to establish if there were grounds to continue with an inquiry against him.
The state appealed the high court decision in the Supreme Court of Appeal, but the appeal was dismissed. The state then went to the Constitutional Court to appeal the decision. That was also dismissed in September 2005.
Unlawful and biased
In 2006, the HPCSA started its own process of investigating Basson’s conduct. A charge sheet was drawn up and the inquiry began in November 2007.
However, the inquiry was delayed when the HPCSA’s main expert witness fell ill. The inquiry resumed again in September 2008.
During the November 2008 hearing, Basson’s lawyers argued that the case brought against him was unlawful and biased.
Basson’s legal team then went to the High Court in Pretoria to stop the inquiry. The matter was heard in the high court in 2010. The court dismissed Basson’s application in May 2010. The next month, Basson appealed the decision in the same court, but lost.
The hearing then resumed officially in September 2011. In January 2012, Basson brought another application before the HPCSA’s professional conduct committee to dismiss the matter. However, this application was also dismissed.
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
Cardiologist Dr Wouter Basson’s professional conduct hearing was postponed on Tuesday because presiding Judge Frikkie Eloff was ill.
The matter was being heard before the Health Professions Council of SA (HPCSA) tribunal.
A witness in the case, former surgeon general of the defence force Neil Knobel, who was scheduled to be cross-examined on Tuesday, could also not make it as he had open heart surgery earlier this month.
Knobel gave evidence before the inquiry was postponed in March.
Chairman of the inquiry, Prof Jannie Hugo, postponed the matter to December 6 and 7. Parties will hold a consultative meeting in October where the health of the two would be reviewed.
Earlier, Basson’s defence counsel Jaap Cilliers suggested the matter be deferred until March next year.
Hugo indicated that a replacement for Judge Eloff would have to be found, if he is not ready to take up the matter in December.
He said if a new adjudicator is brought on board, that person will be given time to become familiar with the long-running case.
Eloff was said to be suffering from pneumonia.
Basson faces four charges of unprofessional and unethical conduct.
The charges relate to his conduct as a medical doctor, when he headed the country’s chemical and biological warfare research programme for the defence force in the 1980s and early 1990s during the apartheid era.
He is accused of acting unethically in the 1980s by co-operating in the large-scale production of Mandrax and cocaine, and for ‘weaponising’ teargas and supplying it to rebel leader Jonas Savimbi in the Angolan war.
He is also accused of acting unethically by providing disorientating substances for cross-border kidnappings and making cyanide capsules available for distribution to operatives for suicide purposes. – Sapa
The investigation of Doctor Wouter Basson by the Health Professionals’ Council of South Africa is expected to be continuing today in Pretoria. Basson, a biological weapons expert, has to answer to four charges before the council, including participating in the manufacture of the drugs Mandrax and Ecstacy and that he supplied former government spies with cyanide capsules.
During a previous hearing, Wouter Basson said that the drugs were manufactured for research purposes and were never used during riots or a war situation.
One of the witnesses against Basson during a previous hearing of the HPCSA, Professor Steven Miles, gave a lecture at Wits University in April. He is described as “an expert in medical ethics and an advocate for human rights”.
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He is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a Faculty member at its Centre for Bioethics. Miles is the author of Oath Betrayed, “a book based on the profound betrayal of traditions that have shaped the medical corps of the US armed forces and of America’s abdication of its leadership role in international human rights”.
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