- Person
- Albie Sachs
- Lived
- b. 1935
- Field
- Human rights law, constitutional justice
- From
- South African
The story
Albie Sachs, a Jewish lawyer from South Africa, had himself been held in solitary confinement without trial and subjected to sleep deprivation by the apartheid security police before he went into exile in 1966. By the early 1980s he was a law professor and then Director of Research in the Ministry of Justice in Mozambique, and he worked closely with Oliver Tambo, the president of the African National Congress in exile.
One day Tambo phoned and asked him to come to Lusaka, in Zambia, for an important project. The ANC had captured a number of agents sent from Pretoria to destroy the organization. As a political party, it had no rules for holding people, trying them or deciding what to do with them, and the host country left the problem to the ANC. When Sachs said that international law was clear that there must be no torture or inhuman treatment, Tambo told him bleakly that the ANC's security people were using torture. Sachs later called what followed possibly the most important legal project of his life.
He helped draft the ANC's Code of Conduct and its statutes: in effect a code of criminal law and procedure for a liberation movement in exile with no courts, police or prisons. Its core was a principle of fundamental human rights for everyone, including enemies: no torture, no abuse, no ill treatment, and trials rather than indefinite detention. At the ANC's 1985 conference in Kabwe, Zambia, delegates debated whether so-called intensive interrogation could ever be allowed. One after another, including young members of the armed wing, they rose to say no: they were fighting for life and would not disrespect the humanity even of those sent to kill them. The code was adopted as binding policy.
Sachs has said that this experience mattered when the time came to write South Africa's democratic constitution: the movement that would lead the new government had already applied fundamental rights to its enemies in desperate conditions, so it needed no persuading about a Bill of Rights. When he was interviewed for the Constitutional Court in 1994, he was questioned about an ANC report on the detention of a commander named Thami Zulu, criticism he felt was unfair given his central role in ending torture in ANC camps.
Today South Africa's Bill of Rights protects every person's freedom and security, including the right not to be tortured and not to be detained without trial.
Why it matters
The ANC's commitment against torture, which Sachs helped write in exile, became part of the foundation for a constitution that today protects everyone in South Africa from torture and detention without trial.
About Albie Sachs
Anti-apartheid lawyer who survived a 1988 car bomb, helped prepare South Africa's democratic constitution and, as a judge, wrote the ruling that opened marriage to same-sex couples.
More about Albie Sachs
Sources
- Albie Sachs Academy of Achievement
- Justice Albie Sachs Constitutional Court of South Africa
- Albie Sachs Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.