Walus loses SA citizenship

Chris Hani’s killer Janusz Walus’ SA citizenship has been revoked and he has been served with deportation papers, it emerged in the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) in Bloemfontein yesterday.

“The respondent’s South African citizenship has been withdrawn sometime in the past four weeks, and a warrant of deportation has been served on the head of prisons by the department of home affairs,” Walus’s advocate, Roelof du Plessis, told the court.

Minister of Justice and Correctional Services Michael Masutha was trying to overturn a 2016 court order giving Walus parole.

Yesterday’s court action was the second attempt this month to block Walus’ release, after Justice Mandisa Maya noted the Hani family’s victim impact statement to the Parole Board had apparently never been given to Masutha.

Last year, home affairs stated that Walus was given a “permanent residence permit in 1981 prior to attaining citizenship through the naturalisation process in 1987 under legislation administered by the apartheid government”.

Judge Nicoline Janse van Niewenhuizen of the High Court in Pretoria, who granted Walus parole, raised the ire of the South African Communist Party (SACP) when she said the views of the Hani family did not matter, and that the family had to move on after 23 years of the murder.

“The SACP condemned these inconsiderate, insensitive, uncaring remarks, which we believe played a central role in her decision to grant Walus parole,” it said in a statement at the time.

“His own psychological evaluation from prison states that he still harbours his hatred for communists, which he admittedly followed to kill Hani. He remains a danger not only to communists, but to our society and to the development of our democracy, whose foundation we achieved in 1994, a year after he was arrested for the murder,” the SACP said.

Amnesty for Walus was refused by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.