Medical parole for dying prisoners came under the scrutiny of Parliament's correctional services portfolio committee on Tuesday, but any discussion of convicted fraudster Schabir Shaik's case was ruled out of line up front by its chairman. "We will not discuss Schabir Shaik today... If you want to raise it, I will call you to order," Dennis Bloem told department officials ahead of their briefing to the committee on the early release of terminally ill inmates.

Shaik, who was ANC president Jacob Zuma's financial adviser, is serving a 15-year sentence for fraud and corruption, but has spent more time in hospital than in prison. His brothers, Yunis and Mo Shaik, warned at the weekend their brother was "extremely, extremely ill", and called for his release from jail on medical grounds.

According to reports, Shaik is suffering from severely high blood pressure. Speaking at Tuesday's briefing, Correctional Services Minister Ngconde Balfour warned that the committee needed to be extremely careful when it came to considering possible amendments to legislation around medical parole. "We need to scrutinise it and make sure it doesn't open loopholes... and floodgates.

The judicial system should never be undermined," he said. Medical parole for prisoners applied only to those who were pronounced by a doctor to be terminally ill. "We are talking terminal, final phase," Balfour said. Any such decision included obtaining a second, independent medical assessment of the prisoner's condition. On who was eligible for medical parole, he said: "You can't get in today, sentenced for 15 years, and then tomorrow you tell us you are terminally ill, and therefore you need to be released. I will not agree to that. I am sorry, I cannot agree to that. "You have got to do part of your sentence -- you were sentenced by the courts! We have got an obligation to the courts to uphold the law. So you can't just get in today and say: 'I'm so terminally ill that I need to get out'. This can't happen," Balfour said.

According to figures tabled by correctional services at the briefing, a total of 50 inmates were released on medical parole during the 2007/08 financial year, and 81 the year before. The department, citing reports by the Inspecting Judge of Prisons, also reported that 1249 inmates died in prison in 2006, and 1056 during 2007. Last month the committee voiced concern over why so many prisoners were dying of natural causes in prison, instead of at home.

Later on Tuesday, Bloem told Sapa his committee had still to decide on a date for a briefing by the department on Shaik's case, but said this would take place "before the end of the month [August]". It would include correctional services officials, but not the doctor who was treating Shaik, he said. Earlier, the committee heard it was difficult to determine whether a prisoner was "terminally" ill. "Medical practitioners often find it difficult to declare a person as being in the final phase of terminal illness," deputy prisons commissioner Teboho Motseke told MPs.

With acknowledgements to Richard Davies and Sapa.