The Trials of Richard Goldstone by Daniel Terris

Author:Daniel Terris [Terris, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: South, International, Criminology, Africa, Europe, Genocide & War Crimes, Biography & Autobiography, Lawyers & Judges, Social Science, Political Science, Republic of South Africa, Eastern, History, Law, General, Human Rights
ISBN: 9780813599960
Google: k-dWDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 39391541
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2018-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

13   GLOBETROTTER

IN FEBRUARY 1995, Richard Goldstone had been particularly happy to get away from The Hague for a few days. Progress on the indictments for the ICTY was stalled, and the prosecutor’s battle with the court’s judges was heating up. So the long flight from Amsterdam to Johannesburg proved a welcome respite. Even better was the reason that he was making the trip. On February 14, 1995, the new Constitutional Court of South Africa was to be officially opened by President Nelson Mandela. A new era of law and justice was beginning in Goldstone’s native country. Goldstone himself was attending in his formal role as a member of the Court’s first bench, yet his presence was anomalous. While he was in The Hague, his seat was being kept warm by Sydney Kentridge, one of the senior statesmen of South Africa’s anti-apartheid legal community.

The Constitutional Court had adopted as its symbol the concept of “justice under a tree,” an African trope that represented humanity as a sheltered collective under the embracing branches of the law. At the ceremony, and later on the bench, the judges donned forest-green robes to echo this theme, and Goldstone found it a “moving experience” to wear his for the first time. The ritual echoed the diversity of the nation. Judges could choose to be sworn in in any of country’s eleven official languages, with or without their hands on the sacred text of their choice. Goldstone took his oath in English, with his hand on a Bible. For all the pageantry, Nelson Mandela remained the center of the occasion. “The last time I appeared in court was to hear whether or not I was going to be sentenced to death,” Mandela told the gathering. “Fortunately for myself and my colleagues we were not. Today I rise not as an accused, but on behalf of the people of South Africa, to inaugurate a court South Africa has never had, a court on which hinges the future of our democracy.”1

The Court’s first order of business was a groundbreaking case: to decide whether the death penalty would make the transition from the apartheid regime to the new polity. The day after the formal opening, the judges sat for the first hearings in S. v. Makwanyane, an appeal of a 1993 case in which the defendants had been sentenced to death for murder. The case, focusing on the legality of capital punishment, promised to be a landmark first test of the human rights principles embedded into the interim constitution that had given birth to the new South Africa.2

Richard Goldstone did not take part in the Makwanyane case or the other cases of the Constitutional Court’s first eighteen months. He did, however, take a three-week break from The Hague a year later to participate in an even more momentous procedure: the Constitutional Court’s certification of the permanent constitution of the Republic of South Africa. As of 1994, the country was operating under an interim constitution that was the result of negotiations between the apartheid regime and the anti-apartheid parties.

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