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Updated 11.30
A SOUTH AFRICAN court has cleared sprinter Oscar Pistorius for international travel, easing stringent bail conditions imposed on him for killing his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day.
“I find that the magistrate’s decision not to grant the appellant his passport to travel abroad was wrong,” Judge Bert Bam told the High Court in Pretoria today.
The 26-year-old’s passport must be handed to his attorney and the “applicant be allowed to use his passport outside South Africa,” Bam said.
Pistorius was also given the go-ahead to return to his Pretoria home where he shot dead Reeva Steenkamp, in what he claims was an accidental shooting but which the state argues was premeditated murder.
The double amputee Paralympic champion was contesting his strict conditions of his ZAR1 million (€84,000) release on bail ahead of his return to court in June.
Lawyers for Pistorius, who was not present at today’s appeal hearing, told the court that he was not a flight risk.
“Why would this athlete go to a country without extradition and go and hide?” lawyer Barry Roux asked, saying the bail terms were tantamount to “house arrest”.
Pistorius, who last year became the first double amputee to compete against able-bodied athletes in the Olympics, has cancelled upcoming competitions and has not restarted training, according to his agent Peet Van Zyl.
But Roux said Pistorius wants to be able to go abroad under controlled circumstances if he needs to for income purposes.
“It is not as if the appellant is travelling for holiday in Mauritius; it’s only to gain an income, there’s no other reason,” Roux said.
His next court appearance is scheduled for 4 June, but the prosecution said they were not sure trial would start on that date.
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Not enough socialism, apparently.
@P.J. Nolan: essential ingredients of successful durable socialism is a brutally heavy handed military government, fake elections and an elite oligarchy. It never works without those pillars.
@alphanautica: you mean like norway, sweden or finland? Awful kips huh? Thank god we live here.
@Fake Avast: Yeah it was the USA that made Venezuela into an ungovernable socialist hellhole and not the policies of Hugo Chavez as he rots in the ground
Venezuela is AAA-PBP-SF’s role model economy.
This article is clearly as cheap shot at undermining their economic expertise.
@alphanautica: #pearseknowsbest
@Honeybadger197: Corbyn should head over on a mission. Give him a good PA system on the main square, they’d all settle down quite quickly once the hear what he has to say.
@alphanautica: There is virtually no policy in Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto that isn’t already followed in the Nordic states. Try playing another record, the Venezuela analogies are looking every bit as threadbare as Lynton Crosby’s IRA smear campaign.
@Harry Whitehead: you might want to get on to Corbyn so: ‘Chavez showed us that there is a different and a better way of doing things’ are his own words coming out of his own megaphone.
All those Corbyn cultists from earlier on should take note that this is his vision of a country that “got socialism right”.
How did we accept austerity so easily? Was it because it mainly dehumanised the poorest & sickest citizens especially Labour and FGs extremely regressive 5 budgets from hell.
Labour you are Still 4-6% in the polls cos u lied to the most vulnerable and caused homelessness ti become the norm for the badly off and people are years now waiting in agony on hospital waiting lists.
No matter what happened in Venezuela it wasn’t these young people’s fault more the fault of older people. If it was my child I’d want them where they were safe which is here.
The Journal goes straight for the click-bait kill as usual. A man wasn’t set alight, he was beating an abandoned state-owned motorbike with a stick, the petrol tank exploded and his clothes caught fire. It was a horrific event, but please don’t resort to lazy journalism for the sake of dramatic headlines
…oh, the unending joys of socialism!
Hopefully Venezuela has an Enda Kenny rising up through the political ranks who can rescue their country from the brink.
As happened in Ireland, we barely escaped the deathly clutches of the hard left, those naive self-convinced loons beset on suffocating economic improvement through hard work and instead wanting to suck an economy dry with their inert socialist begging bowl.
Perhaps there will be Enda Kenny tshirts circulating soon in Venezuela, modelled on Che Guevara, another proud Irishman of principle.
He’s not asking anyone to pay his tuition, the chap was robbed by his government like all the other students who have been robbed of life savings who came here to study. He is highlighting a situation that a lot of Venezuela’s who are here are in. Venezuela is in a dire place and the people are being killed in the streets everyday. They are being starved and robbed. How you can make light of that is beyond me.
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