South African apartheid was a racial caste system that existed from 1948 to 1994. It was a de jure (by law) system that legally segregated people based on four racial classes and disenfranchised non-whites. Under “grand apartheid” people were forcibly relocated people based on race. While the United States was dismantling legal segregation, South Africa was expanding it.
Apartheid led to a thirty-year conflict of brutal internecine violence and gross human rights atrocities; perpetrated primarily, but not only, by the apartheid regime. After the conflict ended and South Africa entered reconstruction, the question of accountability for war crimes loomed. Very innovative and very controversial, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was born of that process. Our final project in Criminal Procedure is to listen to a lecture by Judge Albie Sachs about the TRC, his personal experience with it, and with rebuilding South Africa.
Albie Sachs was a young lawyer in South Africa in the 1950's defending people charged under racial statutes and “security” laws. He joined the freedom movement and eventually went underground with the ANC. In 1988 he survived an assassination attempt by a car bomb in Mozambique. After apartheid ended, he returned to South Africa helped author a new constitution and was one of the architects of the Truth and Reconciliation process.