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Albie Sachs |
Sachs’ law on the judiciary
THERE’S still something of the old devil about him!
Just a fortnight after stepping down as South Africa’s most famous judge, 76 year-old Albie Sachs dropped into Bloomsbury - and proved he’s lost none of his fighting spirit.
Wearing his trademark silk shirt and battered black bushman’s hat, he enchanted an audience of lawyers and politicians with tales of South Africa’s top Constitutional Court.
Albie has just one-arm and one good eye - scars of his struggle against South Africa’s Apartheid regime, which had him locked up, tortured, exiled and blown up. But these experiences guided his groundbreaking judgements which shaped South African law and stirred debate around the world, he revealed.
Reaching a judgement was agonising, he said, a “war between reason and passion, between discovery and justification”. But “reason always requires you to take account of poverty and inequality” and someone who’s never experienced life’s ups and downs “doesn’t deserve to be a judge, doesn’t know vitality”, he said.
Barack Obama, who met Albie a few years ago, was so impressed by Albie’s logic that he appointed a Latino woman judge from a modest background to America’s Supreme Court.
But Albie was less than flattering about the other judges here and in America. Those that claim to apply the letter of the law are too detached from ordinary life, and bring to bear their own prejudices on their judgements, he said: “You can’t depersonalise what is really a very personal thing”. So what about our lofty judges in wigs and ermine? They need to show “more candour about the way they make decisions”, said Albie.
Albie’s final case was a row over toilets - and proved just why he’s one of history’s great judges. Thousands of shanty-town dwellers were deadlocked in a row with the government over new homes. A government offer of chemical toilets while they waited was roundly rejected. They wanted VIPs – Ventilated Improve Pit latrines, that is. When the case finally began hundreds made the gruelling journey to pack the court. But when the government lawyer approached the bench to apologise to Albie and the other judges for not re-housing the people sooner he was ordered to about-face and apologise to the packed gallery instead. Then Albie and the judges took a straw-poll, asking the audience whether it was satisfied with the apology. Only after a resounding approval could the hearing go on. It was the “only high court where it would have seemed appropriate to deal with things in this way,” said Albie.
Afterwards we chatted about his love of the great black baritone and activist Paul Robeson, whose songs Albie sang “when I was much younger and had quite a rich, deep voice”. But when I asked him what he planned to do in his retirement, he looked askance. “I’m not retired! I don’t know what you’d call it, but I’m not retired!” he insisted. On the contrary, he said, his whistle-stop tour included Berlin last week and next week he’s off to Ireland and then Venice where he’ll talk about architecture, his other great passion!
MICHAEL MANN |
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