Albie Sachs

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Albie Sachs 2009

Albert Louis "Albie" Sachs (born January 30, 1935 in Johannesburg ) is a South African lawyer, former judge at the Constitutional Court of the Republic of South Africa and anti- apartheid activist.

Youth and education

Sachs comes from a Jewish family, his parents both immigrated from Lithuania . His father was the socialist and union leader Emil Solomon "Solly" Sachs (1900–1976). His mother Ray Ginsberg was a trained stenographer. She taught the later SACP executive member Moses Kotane to read and write in evening school and subsequently worked as his secretary. In 1942 his parents divorced and he grew up with his mother in Cape Town . His father married again, and from this marriage Sachs has a half-brother and a foster brother.

Although he had always wanted to be a doctor, after graduating from high school at the age of 15, he decided to study law at the University of Cape Town and specialize in human rights . He finished his studies at the age of 21.

activism

His parents' house aroused political interest in him; both parents had belonged to the communist youth movement and were politically active. His father was arrested and sentenced and therefore fled to England in 1953. At the university, Sachs was close to the Modern Youth Society movement , which advocated freedom of expression and an equal society without racial barriers. In 1952 he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign , which protested against apartheid with civil disobedience . He was arrested for taking a seat in the "non-whites" area of ​​the post office. Since he was only 17 years old, he was released immediately.

After completing his studies, he practiced as a lawyer. He primarily defended black people, but also white opponents of apartheid. Many of them face the death penalty . He himself suffered repression, his office was searched and his freedom of movement restricted. Finally, in 1963, he was arrested under a new law. The General Law Amendment Act , Act No 37/1963, the 90-Day Detention Act , allowed political opponents to be detained for 90 days without charge. He spent these 90 days in solitary confinement without any contact with the outside world and without being allowed to speak to a lawyer. On the day of his release, he was arrested again immediately and was detained for another 78 days. Even before his release, a ban was issued against him on the basis of the Suppression of Communism Act , according to which he was not allowed to make public speeches, publish texts or meet with more than one person at once.

He was arrested again two years later, with the length of his uncharged detention doubling to 180 days. South African State Security agents interrogated him and tortured him with sleep deprivation . After he was released, he applied for and was granted an exit permit on condition that he would never return to South Africa.

exile

In 1966 Sachs went into exile in London . With the help of a scholarship, he received his doctorate in law from the University of Sussex . His doctoral thesis dealt with the discrepancy between the principles of South African law and their practical application. He then worked as a law lecturer at the University of Southampton and made lecture tours in support of the ANC.

After eleven years in England, where he never felt at home, he decided to return to Africa in 1977. He opted for South Africa's neighboring state Mozambique , which had gained independence from Portugal two years earlier . He learned the national language Portuguese and took up a professorship for law at Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique's capital Maputo . Many ANC members went into exile in nearby Mozambique and Tanzania, and in the years that followed Sachs worked closely with Oliver Tambo .

This also caught the attention of the South African security forces ( SADF Military Intelligence ). Agents under the command of Henri van der Westhuizen attempted an assassination attempt as early as 1987. They later hid a bomb in Sachs' parked car in Maputo on April 7, 1988, which exploded when he unlocked it. He barely survived the explosion and lost his right arm and went blind in one eye.

During his recovery he was already working on a blueprint for how he believed that South African society should be shaped after the end of apartheid. In 1990, after the ANC was legalized and Nelson Mandela was released , he returned to South Africa.

Judge

Sachs was appointed to the committee that should draft a new constitution. He advocated the incorporation of a Bill of Rights and an independent judiciary into the constitution, as well as the incorporation of basic rights such as housing, health care and a clean environment. After the first free elections in 1994, the new President Mandela appointed him one of the eleven judges at the newly created Constitutional Court.

During his tenure, the Constitutional Court overturned the death penalty and legalized homosexuality . In 2002, the court ruled Thabo Mbeki's government in a high-profile ruling, forcing it to clear the sale of antiretroviral drugs to treat AIDS, which had previously been outlawed. In 2005, Sachs wrote the reasons for the verdict that made same-sex marriages possible in South Africa. His term of office ended in October 2009.

author

In addition to his work as a lawyer and activist, Sachs is also a well-known author. During his exile in London, he wrote The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs about his time in South African custody. The book was adapted for the theater stage and filmed by the BBC in 1981 . On the basis of his doctoral thesis, he wrote Justice in South Africa in 1973 on the South African legal system. Together with Joan Hoff Wilson, he dealt with the latent sexism in the British and American legal systems in Sexism and the Law . For Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter he received the Alan Paton Award in 1991 . In it he deals with the assassination attempt on him and with the "gentle revenge" which he took on the perpetrators by helping to give South Africa a constitution based on human rights and a fair legal system. In 2010 he won the Alan Paton Award a second time for his book The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law .

Awards

Private life

Sachs married his former client and political activist Stephanie Kemp in 1966, who had followed him into exile in London. They have two sons together. The marriage ended in 1977. Since 2006 he has been married to the architect Vanessa September for the second time, with whom he has another son.

Works

  • The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. Harvill Press Ltd, 1966.
  • South Africa: Violence of Apartheid. Christian Action, 1969.
  • Justice in South Africa. Chatto, 1973.
  • Sexism and the Law: A Study of Male Beliefs and Judicial Bias in Britain and America. Martin Robertson & Co Ltd, 1978. (with Joan Hoff Wilson)
  • Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter . Grafton, 1990. (German: Gentle revenge: the survival report of the South African civil rights activist Albie Sachs. Luchterhand, 1991.)
  • Running to Maputo. Harpercollins, 1990.
  • Liberating the Law: Creating Popular Justice in Mozambique. Zed Books Ltd., 1990.
  • The Free Diary of Albie Sachs. Random House, 2004.
  • The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2003) Vol. 6, Sect. 3, Chapter 1 The Former South African Government and its Security Forces, p. 196, item 63 ( Memento of May 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (English; PDF; 480 kB)
personal data
SURNAME Sachs, Albie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sachs, Albert Louis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African lawyer, judge and author
DATE OF BIRTH January 30, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Johannesburg