Judge Daniel Thulare during the Imam Abdullah Haron death inquest at Cape Town High Court on 24 April 2023. (Photo: Shelley Christians)
Using advocacy and raising awareness as key strategies, the work of this committee focuses on building a culture of accountability in South Africa. In particular, the Committee’s current work focuses on supporting efforts aimed at prosecution of apartheid-era gross human rights violations, and re-opened inquests into apartheid-era deaths. It also conducts work on the Apartheid Convention – the international treaty adopted in 1973 which declared Apartheid a crime against humanity and called for its prosecution by states – which South Africa has not yet signed up to. Signing the Convention would place pressure on the South African government to prosecute crimes of apartheid.
The Foundation for Human Rights has been driving the work on accountability for apartheid crimes. You can find more detail on their work on their website on the unfinished business of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, here:
This committee has three key purposes. First, to ensure that the National Preventative Mechanism gets off the ground with the active involvement of civil society to prevent torture in places of detention and confinement. To advance this objective SACTJ has affiliated to the Just Detention Forum and the National Preventative Mechanism Civil Society Organisation Forum.
Second, to engage in public awareness programmes, such as issuing press statements and organizing events to acknowledge key dates such as 26 June – UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture and 30 August – UN International Day of the Disappeared.
Thirdly, the committee connects with networks with similar aims and objectives in the region and continent.
The aim of this committee is to look at the involvement of private companies and corporations in supporting the apartheid regime. During apartheid, many companies broke sanctions for profit in violation of international law, which enabled the regime to continue their repression.
This committee seeks to raise awareness around these companies, the harm they have perpetuated, and apply pressure on relevant government departments to release information from their archives which has until now been kept secret on these issues. It also explores – in the long term – the possibility of obtaining reparations from these companies which could be paid into a fund for victims of apartheid.
In the coming year, SACTJ hopes to bring on board research capacity to progress the work of this committee. Open Secrets, a member of this committee, is currently working on achieving accountability for the Malo Arms Deal, an arms transaction that related to the Rwandan Genocide and was facilitated by Willem ‘Ters’ Ehlers, South African arms dealer and former secretary of PW Botha.
Open Secrets has been spearheading the work on economic crimes, you can find more detail of their work here:
The SACTJ Reparations Committee spearheads demands that South Africa’s post-apartheid government meet its long-standing legal, moral, constitutional and international obligations to provide adequate and appropriate reparations to those who suffered human rights violations under apartheid.
The post-apartheid South African state assumed responsibility for providing redress and reparation as a key pillar of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (the TRC), in return for granting amnesty to perpetrators who fully acknowledged their crimes (a decision that relieved perpetrators of both prosecution, and personal responsibility of paying reparation for their crimes). Despite expectations that the TRC would provide truth, reconciliation, and redress, the TRC identified only 22 thousand recipients for reparation; of these, 20 years later, around 17398 were paid a reduced once-off cash payment of R30 000 rands (as of 2003, equally approximately US $2 000). The state has comprehensively failed to provide promised non-financial assistance to those same people (consisting of medical support, educational support, housing, memorialisation and community rehabilitation). Research today estimates that those identified by the TRC for such reparations constitute between a fifth and a tenth of those who should qualify for reparations under the Promotion of National Unity Act of 1995. Despite two
decades of demands for redress, the state today refuses to allow for any further process to identify and repair apartheid-era victims.
The SACTJ’s Reparations Committee is working to hold a national conference of stakeholders and transitional justice advocates within the next year, to demand that government put into place, without any further delay, a fully mandated reparations policy and process to provide reparations and redress to all who qualify for these. Adequate and inclusive reparation remains a critical and long-overdue step towards righting the on-going damage to our communities and our nation caused by the crime against humanity that constituted apartheid.
The Khulumani Galela campaign has led the way on protest and advocacy around the reparations issue.
