South Africa's Struggle for Human Rights: The History of Rights in South Africa

8. Internationalising rights

75 8 Internationalising rights Internationalcondemnationof apartheidwasledbythe United Nations.At the very first meeting of the General Assembly in 1946 strong criticism was registered at South Africa’s treatment of its Indian citizens. The dramatic confrontation between Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and General Smuts signalled the ebbing authority of the old Commonwealth and the rising power of soon-to-be independent India.97 Consistent criticisms of South Africa’s governance of South West Africa and of apartheid policies as presenting a danger to international peace and security served as further means to circumvent legal objections that the United Nations was not competent to intervene in a sovereign country’s internal policies.98 Crucially, the singularity of South Africa’s racial policies came to serve as a key test of the United Nations’ commitment to the universality of human rights and of the organisation’s ability to provide international moral leadership.99 76 A specially constituted UN Commission found in 1953 that the policies of apartheid contravened the principles and spirit of the UN Charter and its preamble. It concluded that ‘the doctrine of racial superiority on which the apartheid policy is based is scientifically false and extremely dangerous to internal peace and international relations ... [and] contrary to “the dignity and worth of the human person”’. In singling out domestic apartheid practices an important threshold of permissible diplomatic criticism was on the verge of being crossed.100 After the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, the‘policies of apartheid’ began to feature in the General Assembly as a central, stand-alone issue, occasioning (almost) unanimous condemnation.101 In 1967 a General Assembly resolution affirmed the legitimacy of the struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms in South Africa. And in 1973 the General Assembly adopted the ‘International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid’, with its own reporting and trial procedures. The standard response by the South African government was to reject UN claims around human rights as part of an international communist onslaught and to insist on its right to internal jurisdiction over national policies. But it was not entirely immune from such criticisms.102 In the United States, the influence of the civil 77 rights movement was strongly felt, especially as a result of campaigns by the New York-based American Committee on Africa (ACOA), which emerged under the leadership of George M. Houser to give support to the ANC’s Defiance Campaign.103 From its inception in 1953, ACOA and its Africa Fund sought to influence the United Nations, frequently using the occasion of the annual UN-sponsored Human Rights Day in December to protest against apartheid repression in South Africa (sometimes with reciprocal support from organisations within South Africa).104 ACOA’s readiness to campaign against South Africa contrasts with the response of mainstream organisations like the NAACP, which, under strong pressure from the anti-communist American right in the early 1950s, retreated from support of ‘human rights’ and anticolonialism to a more acceptable domestic vision of civil rights for African Americans.105 In 1957 a ‘Declaration of Conscience’ (led by Eleanor Roosevelt and co-sponsored by the ANC president Albert Luthuli and Martin Luther King, Jr.) was timed to coincide with Human Rights Day. It condemned the ‘organized inhumanity’ of apartheid and called on South Africa to honour its obligations under the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Supportive demonstrations were held in Johannesburg and Cape Town, organised by senior churchmen and civil rights activists.106 78 In Britain, the anti-apartheid movement, which emerged in the early 1960s, was a broad coalition that made frequent reference to crimes against humanity perpetrated by the South African state and its callous disregard of fundamental human rights. Churchmen like Canon John Collins, Michael Scott and Trevor Huddleston all played a major role in establishing the AAM.Theybroughttothemovementastrongtradition of Christian humanitarian ethics which connected back to the emancipationist movement of the early 19th century and highlighted apartheid as an affront to human rights.107 In 1968 the British newsletter AntiApartheid News prepared a series of articles which contrasted the UN Declaration of Human Rights with the situation in South Africa. Oliver Tambo, who in exile did much to incubate the ANC’s Christian moral tradition of Albert Luthuli, commemorated the 20th anniversary of the UN Declaration, by noting that ‘South Africa has the distinction of being the only country in the world which boldly and unashamedly’ contravenes the...