Albie Sachs
Albert Louis Sachs , known as Albie Sachs, is a South African lawyer, activist, writer, and former judge appointed to the first Constitutional Court of South Africa by Nelson Mandela.
Early life and education
Albie Sachs was born in Johannesburg at the Florence Nightingale Hospital to Emile Solomon "Solly" Sachs, General Secretary to the Garment Workers' Union of South Africa, and Rachel "Ray" Sachs. Both his mother and father fled to South Africa as children with parents who were escaping persecution against Jews in Lithuania. Sachs shared that at the time they left, the antisemitism had become so violent that "Every Easter, the Cossacks would ride into the villages and say, 'The Jews killed Christ, we're going to kill the Jews.' And my grandparents and others were fleeing into the forests and basements of buildings... so they wanted to escape."Both of his parents were politically active and his father expressed the desire that Sachs "grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation." His mother was a member of the South African Communist Party and worked as a typist for its general secretary Moses Kotane. Sachs said that Kotane's presence in his family's life, in particular the way he was admired by Sachs's mother, made it clear to him that racism was absurd, inhuman, and unjust.
His parents separated when he was a toddler and he moved with his mother and younger brother Johnny to a modest beachside home in Cape Town. Sachs excelled in school and was moved forward two grades, in part due to a shortage of schoolteachers in South Africa during World War II. He attended South African College Schools, where he edited the school magazine, for junior and high school before graduating. He started law school at the University of Cape Town at the age of 15, and won a prize for English in his first year. He was admitted to the bar in South Africa and began practicing law at 21, and became an advocate for those being prosecuted under racist and oppressive laws, including people who opposed apartheid.
Activism and exile
On 6 April 1952, white South Africans commemorated 300 years since the arrival of Dutch colonisers, particularly Jan van Riebeeck. Many also celebrated the recent electoral victory of the National Party and the introduction of the word apartheid to the English language. Sachs, then a second-year law student, joined two hundred Black South Africans at a meeting to support the African National Congress, the National Party's opposition, in a working-class area of Cape Town. The ANC launched their Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws the same day. Though Sachs was initially told that the Defiance Campaign was a Black campaign led by Black people, he later led a group of young white South Africans to sit in chairs reserved for Black South Africans at the post office. In 1955, Sachs attended the Congress of the People in Kliptown. More than 2,000 delegates supporting the ANC adopted the Freedom Charter, which envisaged equal rights for all in a future South Africa that "belongs to all that live in it, black and white."As part of the opposition, Sachs was subject to predawn raids by the security police and governmental restrictions on his activities, including meeting with more than one person at any given time. He was also banned from publishing. He was eventually arrested and detained in solitary confinement under the 90-Day Detention Law. He was released after three months but was promptly rearrested and held for an additional seventy-eight days. He was arrested again in 1966, which he described as the "worst moment of life." He was subjected to a spell of sleep deprivation by a security team whose head had been trained in torture methods by the French Directorate-General for External Security in Algeria. Upon his release, he was given permission to leave South Africa under the condition that he never return.
England
Sachs left for England accompanied by Stephanie Kemp, a former client and later cellmate. They married, had children, and continued their anti-apartheid work in the London branch of the ANC. His ANC work brought him to different countries in Europe but he was denied entry to the United States, which regarded the ANC as a terrorist organisation. After policy changes, he was able to visit the US, where he attended the Trial of the Chicago 7 at the invitation of the lawyers defending the Black Panthers. Sachs supported Bobby Seale and later met Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton.Sachs attended Sussex University with financial aid from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and completed his doctorate in 1970 under Norman Cohn and G. I. A. D. Draper. His thesis, titled Justice in South Africa, was published in both the UK and the USA but was banned in South Africa, with those in possession of it facing prison time. Between 1970 and 1977, Sachs was a lecturer in the law faculty at the University of Southampton, where he wrote Sexism and the Law with historian Joan Hoff-Wilson. He also published The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, which illustrated his time in detainment, in 1966 and Stephanie on Trial, which covered Kemp's imprisonment and his second arrest, in 1968.
Mozambique
Sachs moved to the newly independent Mozambique in 1977, where he worked as a law professor at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo and studied Portuguese to fluency. He was later the Ministry of Justice's Director of Research. While in Mozambique, Sachs visited the ANC headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, at the invitation of Oliver Tambo, where Tambo asked him to draft a code of conduct for the ANC that forbade the use of torture and highlighted the party's democratic principles. The ANC adopted it as a binding policy after it was presented by Sachs at a conference in Kabwe in 1985.Sachs helped lay the foundations for the future constitution of South Africa by serving as a scribe and provided Tambo with legal support.
Assassination attempt and aftermath
On 7 April 1988, Sachs opened the door to his car and it exploded. Sachs lost his right arm and vision in his left eye, and a passerby was killed. He was stabilized in Mozambique, then flown to London Hospital to recover. There, he received a letter promising he would be avenged. Sachs decided to seek not revenge, but "soft vengeance." This "soft vengeance" would take the form of getting freedom in a new non-racial and democratic South Africa based on human rights and the rule of law.After recovering from the attack, Sachs established and became the founding director of the South African Constitutional Studies Centre at the University of London. He then flew to Dublin to work on the first draft of South Africa's Bill of Rights along with Kader Asmal under the direction of the ANC. In early 1989, Sachs went to the US to work with Jack Greenberg at the Columbia School of Law and Louis Henkin at the School of International and Public Affairs.
He attended a Law and Justice Seminar in Aspen, Colorado moderated by Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, whose personal physician spoke about the intersection of his Catholic identity and his opposition to abortion and his belief that his own beliefs should not be forced on others with different beliefs. Despite the physician's staunch objection to abortion, he supported the passing of Roe v Wade. Sachs took from this the idea of the relationship between the sacred and the secular, which would later influence his own judgments.
While in the US, Sachs also learned to use a computer and wrote The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter, where he reflected on his recovery.
Return to South Africa
Sachs returned to South Africa in 1990 after the unbanning of the ANC and other political organizations and the release of Nelson Mandela. There, he worked at the University of the Western Cape in the law faculty with Dullah Omar and was appointed honorary professor at the University of Cape Town after his lecture Perfectibility and Corruptibility. He continued working with the ANC's Constitutional Committee and in 1990 published Protecting Human Rights in South Africa. This book contained the controversial paper Preparing Ourselves for Freedom, which proposed that the ANC stop saying that "culture is a weapon of struggle" by arguing that the sociopolitical impact of culture was too complex and full of ambiguity to be reduced to "a weapon that simply fired in one direction." Sachs was elected to the ANC's National Executive Committee in 1991 ahead of the ANC's first conference in South Africa. He worked with UWC to organized workshops on electoral systems, land rights, regional government, and affirmative action, among other topics. In December 1992, Sachs worked on ANC's team during negotiations for a new constitutional order.Sachs also served on Working Group Two, which dealt with the nature of the South African State and the process for constitution-making. CODESA negotiations broke down but were later resumed as the Multi-Party Negotiation Process, which led to the drafting of the Interim Constitution. This provided for South Africa's first democratic elections, which would populate its Parliament. Parliamentary members formed the Constitutional Assembly and drafted the final version of the Constitution.
The interim Constitution also provided for the creation of an independent Constitutional Court, which would ensure that fundamental rights would be upheld during the Constitution-making period both to ensure and to certify that the text of the final text Constitution complied with the 34 Principles agreed to during negotiations.
Sachs has been widely credited as the "chief architect" of the post-apartheid 1996 Constitution, a label that he firmly rejects, insisting that the Constitution was the product of large groups of people working over many years and culminating in the intense work of the Constitutional Assembly, of which he was not even a member. He has said that, if one were to do a paternity test on South Africa's Constitution, that Oliver Tambo's DNA would be revealed.