Families Renew Call for Release of SA Engineers Imprisoned in Equatorial Guinea for a Year

This week marks one year since the arrest of two South African engineers in Equatorial Guinea. Frik Potgieter and Peter Huxham were detained on Feb. 9, 2023. While no formal charges were made against the pair for their first two weeks of detention, they were then found guilty of “trafficking and illicit possession” of the drug cocaine, and sentenced to 12 years behind bars and a combined $10 million (R189 million) in fines.

According to the Huxham family’s spokesperson, Francois Nigrini, the sentence and fines thrown at the pair are much higher than Equatorial Guinea law currently allows, and are based on outdated penalties that don’t reflect the country’s new Criminal Code. Furthermore, the court failed to find, test, or prove that the two men had the alleged drug in their possession, and no witnesses or expert opinions were presented to the panel of five judges who made the judgment.

Nigrini and a team of legal aides who are working on the families’ behalf to free the pair have asked the South African government and the UN to step. They believe Potgieter and Huxham have been caught up in a petty geopolitical conflict between the Central African country and South Africa. “They are hostages,” said Nigrini. “Their incarceration is not their fault, but even worse, there is nothing they can do to secure their release. It is only the South African government that can do this." He said that it is also a violation of Article 1 of the UN's Hostage Convention, which both South Africa and Equatorial Guinea are parties to.

The pair were arrested shortly after the president’s son, Vice President Teodoro Ngueme Obiang, had a number of his luxury possessions impounded in Cape Town. Obiang’s superyacht and two palatial homes were seized by the Western Cape High Court. Obiang lost a court case to a local businessman, Daniel Janse van Rensburg, who claimed that he had experienced torture and an unlawful arrest at the hands of Obiang and demanded $2.2 million in compensation. van Rensburg said he was detained in Equatorial Guinea for 500 days due to “a business deal gone wrong.” Obiang, who is the son of Equatorial Guinea’s president who has been in power since 1979, had his yacht returned to him shortly after, but the prisoners remain in detention.

The two engineers, who had never met before being made to share a jail cell, were in Equatorial Guinea’s capital Malabo for work at the time of their arrest. They work for the same Dutch firm, SBM Production Contractors, on different vessels and had been working on offshore oil and gas platforms when their plans to return home were stifled.

In a statement in July 2023, Zane Dangor, the Director-General of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), expressed his dismay over the fact that the South African embassy was being denied access to the pair, as Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963 states that countries are to be given access to detainees in other countries.

DIRCO has reportedly arranged two visits to the men and one call each with their partners. In October last year, South African and U.K. citizenship holder Huxham was granted a 21-minute phone call with his family, thanks to the U.K. High Commission to Cameroon.

Potgieter’s daughter has delayed her wedding in the hope that her father will be able to walk her down the aisle, and Huxham’s long-term partner washes and irons his clothes every two weeks in anticipation of his return home. Neither the South African government nor the United Nations have responded as yet.