Dr Nandipha Magudumana lost her appeal to have her detention and extradition from Tanzania declared unlawful.
- The Free State High Court dismissed Dr Nandipha Magudumana’s leave to appeal the decision to declare her extradition from Tanzania unlawful.
- The court found that Magudumana had consented to her extradition when she said she wanted to return to South Africa to see her children.
- Judge Phillip Loubser said Magudumana’s constitutional rights were therefore not violated.
Dr Nandipha Magudumana has lost her appeal to have her arrest and extradition from Tanzania declared unlawful.
At the Free State High Court on Tuesday, Judge Phillip Loubser upheld the original decision to dismiss her application on the grounds that she gave consent when she told police that she wanted to go back to South Africa to see her children.
This is despite the fact that Loubser had in June found that her “deportation” was, in fact, a “disguised extradition”.
In handing down the judgment, Loubser said that when Magudumana was handed over to Department of Home Affairs officials by the South African High Commission, she offered no resistance.
“On the contrary, she informed all and sundry that she wanted to return to South Africa to her children.”
On Friday, during Magudumana’s application, her lawyer, advocate Kessler Perumalsamy, told the court that if his client had consented, it should have been in writing.
He asked the court:
Was she informed of the treaty between South Africa and Tanzania? What was she consenting to? Disguised extradition? Was it after Home Affairs exercised its powers unlawfully? When was consent made and to whom? Is it in writing?
Perumalsamy also said there were grounds for the Supreme Court of Appeal to hear the case.
On Tuesday, Loubser said there was no reasonable prospect of success in another court because “the facts of the matter did not pave the way” for her arrest and deportation to be declared unconstitutional.
He said it was not the state’s stance that Magudumana had “consented” but rather that she said she wanted to return home to her children.
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“This is the true nature of her consent,” he said.
Loubser referred to a previous judgment which found that “when a person voluntarily [returns] to South Africa, there [is] no infraction of South African or public international law”.
“There is also then no violation of such a person’s fundamental human rights,” the judge quoted.
He dismissed the application for leave to appeal with costs.
Magudumana is accused of aiding and abetting convicted rapist and murderer Thabo Bester to escape from prison last year, defeating the ends of justice, arson, fraud and violating a body.
She will appear in court on 8 August with 11 co-accused, including Bester and her father, Zolile Sekeleni.