A child of the freedom struggle
Albert Louis Sachs, always known as Albie, was born on January 30, 1935, in the Florence Nightingale Hospital in Johannesburg, a building that stands directly across the road from where South Africa's Constitutional Court would one day be built. His parents, Emile Solomon "Solly" Sachs and Rachel "Ray" Ginsberg, were Lithuanian Jews who had come to South Africa as children with families fleeing violent attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire. Both grew up to be political activists. Solly became General Secretary of the Garment Workers' Union, and Ray worked as a typist for Moses Kotane, the general secretary of the Communist Party. Sachs later said that watching his mother's deep respect for Kotane, a Black leader, made it plain to him from early childhood that racism was absurd, inhuman and unjust.
On his sixth birthday, during World War II, his father sent him a card expressing the wish that he would grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation. His parents separated when he was a toddler, and he moved with his mother and younger brother Johnny to a modest home near the beach in Cape Town. A bright pupil, he was moved forward two grades, edited the magazine at South African College Schools, and began studying law at the University of Cape Town at the age of 15.
A young lawyer against apartheid
In April 1952, while white South Africa celebrated 300 years since the arrival of Dutch settlers, the African National Congress (ANC) launched its Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws. Sachs, a 17-year-old second-year law student, joined in. He led a group of young white South Africans who sat in seats at the post office reserved for Black people, a small act of civil disobedience that marked the start of a lifetime of human rights work. Three years later he was at Kliptown for the Congress of the People, where more than 2,000 delegates adopted the Freedom Charter, with its promise that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black and white.
He was admitted to the Cape Bar at 21. Most of his cases involved defending people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws, and many of his clients faced the death sentence. In the late 1950s, he recalled, there was still some space in the courts: cases could be won, and losses could be appealed. That space was closing fast.
Solitary confinement and exile
The security police raided his home before dawn and placed him under banning orders that stopped him from publishing and from meeting more than one person at a time. He was eventually detained in solitary confinement without trial under the 90-Day Detention Law. Released after three months, he was immediately rearrested and held for 78 more days. In 1966 he was arrested again and subjected to sleep deprivation by a security team, an ordeal he called the worst moment of his life. On his release he was allowed to leave the country on condition that he never return.
He spent the next 11 years in England with Stephanie Kemp, a former client and fellow detainee whom he married. He earned a doctorate at the University of Sussex in 1970; his thesis, published as Justice in South Africa, was banned at home. He taught law at the University of Southampton from 1970 to 1977 and wrote Sexism and the Law with the historian Joan Hoff-Wilson. His book The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, published in 1966, was later adapted by the playwright David Edgar for the Royal Shakespeare Company and broadcast by the BBC in 1981, carrying the reality of detention without trial to audiences far beyond South Africa.
Mozambique and a code against torture
In 1977 Sachs moved to newly independent Mozambique, learned Portuguese to fluency, and became a professor of law at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo. From 1983 he was Director of Research in the Ministry of Justice. During these years he worked closely with Oliver Tambo, the ANC's president in exile, whom he came to regard as one of the great influences of his life.
Tambo called him to Lusaka with a troubling problem. The ANC had captured agents sent by Pretoria to destroy the organization, it had no rules for how they should be treated, and, Tambo admitted, its security staff were using torture. Sachs helped draft a code of conduct and statutes for the movement: in his words, a code of criminal law and procedure for a liberation movement with no courts, police or prisons, built on the principle of no torture, no abuse and no ill treatment of anyone. At the ANC's 1985 conference in Kabwe, Zambia, delegates, including young fighters from its armed wing, rejected so-called intensive interrogation, and the code was adopted as binding policy. Sachs later said this experience meant that when it came time to write a constitution, the movement needed no persuading about the importance of fundamental rights.
The bomb in Maputo
On April 7, 1988, Sachs opened the door of his parked car in Maputo and a bomb planted by South African security agents exploded. A passerby was killed. Sachs was riddled with shrapnel, his ribs broken and his eardrums punctured, and doctors worked for seven hours to save his life. He lost his right arm and the sight in his left eye. After being stabilized in Mozambique he was flown to the London Hospital to recover.
In hospital he received a letter promising that he would be avenged. He decided instead on what he called soft vengeance: the attack would be answered not by revenge but by a free, nonracial and democratic South Africa built on human rights and the rule of law. His memoir of recovery, The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter, won a Sunday Times CNA Literary Award in 1991. Years later, a man named Henri, who had organized the placing of the bomb, came to see Sachs before testifying to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Sachs would not shake his hand that day. Months later, after Henri had told the commission everything, they met again by chance, and Sachs shook his hand.
Preparing a democratic constitution
Once he had recovered, Sachs devoted himself full time to preparing for a new constitution. He became founding director of the South African Constitution Studies Centre at the University of London, which later moved to the University of the Western Cape. Working under the direction of the ANC, he went to Dublin to work with Kader Asmal on a first draft of a Bill of Rights for South Africa. He also spent time at Columbia University in New York working with the civil rights lawyer Jack Greenberg and the human rights scholar Louis Henkin.
After the ANC was unbanned and Nelson Mandela released in 1990, Sachs returned home after 24 years in exile. As a member of the ANC's Constitutional Committee, and from 1991 of its National Executive Committee, he took an active part in the negotiations that led South Africa to constitutional democracy, including serving on a working group of the CODESA talks that dealt with how a constitution should be made. He argued persuasively for a Bill of Rights and an independent judiciary, for the peaceful competition of political parties, and for a constitution that would name rights to housing, water, health care and a clean environment.
Sachs is often called the chief architect of the 1996 Constitution, a label he firmly rejects. The final text was written by the elected Constitutional Assembly, of which he was not a member, and he insists it was the work of large groups of people over many years. If you did a paternity test on the Constitution, he has said, it would reveal Oliver Tambo's DNA. What the sources support is that he was one of the ANC's leading legal thinkers in drafting rights proposals and in the negotiations that produced the interim and final constitutions.
Fifteen years on the Constitutional Court
In October 1994, after the first democratic elections, President Mandela appointed Sachs to the newly created Constitutional Court, and he resigned from the ANC's leadership. His interview with the Judicial Service Commission drew criticism over his part in an ANC report on the detention of the guerrilla commander Thami Zulu, criticism Sachs considered unfair given his central role in ending torture in ANC camps. Over the next 15 years the court struck down the death penalty and the corporal punishment of juveniles and built a foundation for enforcing social and economic rights.
Sachs wrote a series of judgments that still shape daily life in South Africa. In August v Electoral Commission (1999) the court held that prisoners could not be stripped of the vote without a law consistent with the Constitution; Sachs wrote that the vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and personhood. In Port Elizabeth Municipality v Various Occupiers (2004) the court refused to evict homeless families living on unused land without regard to their circumstances, and Sachs described ubuntu, the African idea of human interdependence, as a unifying motif of the Bill of Rights. In S v M (2007) he put the interests of children at the center of the decision whether to jail their sole caregiver. His dissent in Volks v Robinson (2005), arguing that a woman who had shared her life with an unmarried partner should not be treated as a legal stranger to his estate, was vindicated when the court adopted that position in 2021.
His best known judgment came in Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie, decided on December 1, 2005. Writing for the court, Sachs held that the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage violated the Constitution's guarantees of equality and dignity. The court was unanimous on that point and, by a majority, gave Parliament a year to change the law. The Civil Union Act took effect on November 30, 2006, making South Africa the fifth country in the world to recognize same-sex marriage. With Justice Yvonne Mokgoro he also built the court's celebrated art collection, housed in its building on the site of the Old Fort Prison, where Gandhi and Mandela had both been held.
A secular Jew
Sachs was born into a Jewish family, and he has always identified as a Jew. In a 2009 interview with the Academy of Achievement he explained that his parents had rejected the religion their own parents tried to impose on them, and that religion played no role in his upbringing. He described himself as a Jew by birth, association, culture, history and existence, and recalled the hard work, as a boy of nine or ten, of thinking through questions of belief and conscience for himself.
He calls himself a very secular person who respects the beliefs of others and is proud to be Jewish. His family's own history of flight from persecution, his grandparents hiding from pogroms in Lithuania, is part of the story he has told about why racial injustice was intolerable to him from the start.
Legacy: rights that people use every day
Sachs retired from the court in October 2009. The rights he helped write into South Africa's founding law, and the judgments he wrote enforcing them, are used every day: same-sex couples marry under the Civil Union Act, prisoners vote in national elections, families facing eviction can ask the courts to weigh their circumstances, and children's interests must be considered when their caregivers are sentenced. The ANC's rule against torturing captives, which he helped draft in exile, became part of the moral foundation of the democracy that followed.
Since retiring he has traveled the world sharing South Africa's experience of healing a divided society, from Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka to Colombia's peace process. He served on UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee, which drafted the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, and on Kenya's Judges and Magistrates Vetting Board. He received the first Tang Prize in Rule of Law in 2014, and in 2022 the Clooney Foundation for Justice named its Albie Awards for human rights defenders in his honor. The Guardian has called him arguably the world's most famous judge, a reputation built not on revenge for what was done to him but on the soft vengeance of a constitution that protects everyone.
Sources & further reading
Albie Sachs, Wikipedia · Albie Sachs: Freedom Fighter Against Apartheid, Academy of Achievement · Justice Albie Sachs, Constitutional Court of South Africa · Justice Albie Sachs, ConCourtBlog · Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.