Britain’s exit from the European convention on human rights could trigger the disintegration of respect for international law, the prominent South African jurist Albie Sachs has warned.
The veteran lawyer and ANC activist, who was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the country’s highest court, has sounded the alarm over the potential domino effect of Conservative plans to scrap the UK’s Human Rights Act and its impact on the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Sachs, who is now 80, spoke to the Guardian while in London to lecture on Magna Carta at the British Library.
“If you did a paternity test you would find the UK’s genes are there in the ECHR’s conception. The threat to withdraw would be like Daddy leaving home,” he said. The country that was the founder of the European convention and the ECHR, he added, “could become the dismantler of the entire enterprise”.
The South African former judge added: “It would be a huge disappointment to lawyers throughout the world who believe in defending universal values to see the UK withdrawing from an institution to which it has contributed so much.
“If the UK walks out of the European convention because some decisions go against it, people in South Africa who would like to withdraw from the ICC will say: ‘If [the British] do it, why shouldn’t we do it?’”
The former ANC exile still bears the scars of the anti-apartheid conflict. In 1988, he was nearly killed by a car bomb in Mozambique. He lost his right hand and was blinded in his left eye.
Asked about the recent British tribunal ruling that GCHQ has illegally intercepted communications from a South African human rights group, Sachs reflected on his counter-espionage training. “I belong to a pre-satellite intelligence generation,” he explained. “I worked in the underground in South Africa for many years and got into the habit of not using telephones or offices [that might be bugged] or saying anything I didn’t want [overheard].
“This has become so ingrained in me that surveillance seems to concern me a little less for that reason … but I’m happy so many people are speaking out about it. For many people it is intrusive. Edward Snowden is very popular in South Africa. He spilt the beans; they were beans that needed to be spilt.”
Sachs, who spent 15 years on South Africa’s constitutional court, has just stepped down from his last legal position: on the international cricket council’s disciplinary appeals board. One of his last cases was the inquiry into Pakistan’s spot-fixing scandal.
A film of his memoir, The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter, has recently been released and Sachs is now working on a new script. “It’s fiction,” he explained. “I’m getting enormous pleasure from working on it.”
The former judge says he is often asked whether modern South Africa is the country for which he fought. “I say it’s the country we were fighting for but not the society – but we have the values and institutions to bring about changes that are necessary.
“Our president steps downafter two terms maximum. Our elections are free and fair. We have a lively press, South Africans speak their mind. [But] we don’t have the physical security to which we are entitled.
“There’s massive inequality but to some extent that poverty is cushioned by the fact that some 12 million people have moved from shacks to brick homes with electricity and sewage. Ninety per cent of homes have electricity and clean water. There’s a black middle class driving the economy now.””
As an anti-apartheid exile, Sachs used to lecture at Southampton University. He is now a regular visitor to Britain “I visited the supreme court building [in Westminster] when it was being disembowelled in order to let more light in.
“I was the first person to sign the visitors’ book. It turned out, however, that the Queen was due to open it. So they scrapped that first visitors’ book and Her Majesty became the first person to sign it.”
That rewriting of history is what also attracts and repels him about Magna Carta. Unlike the United States, which worships the medieval charter’s legacy, copies of the 800-year-old document do not feature in South African courts.
“On the one hand it’s a great document, limiting arbitrary power and stressing the importance of a fair trial,” Sachs said. “But on the other it came to us through the British empire along with torture, machine guns, whipping and hanging. It was important for us to emphasise that we won our own freedom and created our own constitution.”
Rightwing distrust within the UK of the Strasbourg court has developed at the same time as mounting resentment of the ICC in Africa – partly because the court based in The Hague is perceived as targeting only sub-Saharan suspects and failing to bring to justice westerners whose states have not signed up to the ICC.
Britain’s prospective departure, envisaged in the Conservative manifesto, has already been seized on by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as grounds for not enforcing judgments, Sachs noted.
Sach’s trip to London follows the international furore over the invitation to South Africa extended to the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the ICC for alleged genocide and war crimes.
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