Abstract
As South Africa approaches 30 years of democracy, it is important to pause to reflect and analyze the trajectory of human rights since the fall of the apartheid regime and the advent of multiracial democracy. Although there was a large global movement against apartheid, this movement's vigilance for human rights in South Africa quickly declined and dissolved with the advent of South African democracy. There is little critical engagement with South Africa's contemporary human rights record and policies by global human rights activists, nongovernmental organizations, and civil society and still less active campaigning in defense of the human rights of South Africans, especially South Africa's most vulnerable and disadvantaged black majority. The energy that was summoned to protest apartheid and to boycott it never returned since the advent of democracy. This commentary explores the current state of human rights in South Africa, their prospects, and challenges to their respect, protection, and fulfillment.
Keywords
Black South Africans: Still Marginalized and Disadvantaged
As South Africa approaches 30 years of democracy, it is important to pause to reflect and analyze the trajectory of human rights since the fall of the apartheid regime and the advent of multiracial democracy. Although there was a large global movement against apartheid, this movement's vigilance for human rights in South Africa quickly declined and dissolved with the advent of South African democracy. There is little critical engagement with South Africa's contemporary human rights record and policies by global human rights activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and civil society and still less active campaigning in defense of the human rights of South Africans, especially its most vulnerable and disadvantaged black majority. The energy that was summoned to protest apartheid and to boycott it never returned since the advent of democracy, and the new South African government found and finds itself largely free to pursue policies that are often antithetical to the human rights of South Africans, with little accountability and consequence.
Once human rights violations were not explicitly intended in a racist way by the new democratic South African government—although they were often deeply racist in effect and outcome—there was and still remains little protest from global human rights defenders. Minimal pro forma human rights reporting by NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch takes place, but it is largely inconsequential at changing South African government policies, is not part of a strategic global human rights campaign, and has received little attention from human rights activists. Neither organization has shown the same depth of commitment, investment of resources, organizing, and advocacy to advancing human rights in South Africa today as they did during apartheid and in the decade leading up to South Africa's transition to democracy.
This is a subject that merits critical attention and analysis as it raises troubling questions about the extent to which human rights are defended selectively, at certain times, in certain contexts, when they animate primarily Western activists and donors. When these activists and donors no longer feel any great commitment to a cause, they move on and retreat. The impact of that retreat, for black South Africans, has been devastating.
Since the fall of apartheid—as under apartheid—the group experiencing the most severe human rights violations has been black South Africans as a whole. The exception is a very small black elite within or tied to the African National Congress (ANC) with access to government funds and business contracts. The second group experiencing particularly severe human rights violations within South Africa is black South African girls and women, within the black South African community. Another major area of human rights failure in South Africa is the failure to defend the human rights of South Africans identifying as lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender individuals, who face extremely high rates of violent assaults. Finally, South Africa remains one of the most violent countries in the world, with extraordinarily high rates of violent crime including sexual violence and murder—overwhelmingly impacting South Africa's black and colored communities. The extent to which civilians have security of person and enjoy peace and safety is one way of measuring a country's human rights protections. By this standard, South Africa is failing. Other countries in Africa with experiences of systemic racial persecution and discrimination, such as Rwanda—and culminating in a massive genocide in Rwanda—have done a far better job of protecting the right to life of their citizens and ensuring peace.
Another and related form of often unchecked criminality and human rights violations is the failure of the South African government to protect the human rights of black Africans who are not South African nationals—many of whom come to South Africa in large numbers as migrants seeking work and opportunity. They face discrimination and xenophobia and have been subject to violence and killing in massacres that have taken place several times in the past two decades. Black African nationals continue to suffer from discrimination and bigotry, including abuse and violence directed against them by other South Africans who often resent them not on the basis of their color but their perceived “foreignness,” because they hail from other African countries and cultures and are not South African citizens.
Corruption is another measure by which South Africa is failing to fulfill human rights. With over 50 billion dollars stolen from government funds, it is clear that without this corruption South Africa would be able to meet the social and economic rights of its citizens and rectify immense injustices—particularly those that are a legacy of apartheid racism. So much of the legacy of apartheid remains in place because of these stolen funds which should have been directed to healthcare, housing, education, job creation, and infrastructure development and broad social services for the benefit of all South Africans and especially for black South Africans.
South African Foreign Policy: Rejecting Human Rights
It is important to acknowledge that in the global sphere as well the South African government and its ruling ANC party have long ignored even the pretensions of respect for human rights and international human rights law. The South African government's global record on human rights since the end of apartheid has been notably weak and often in outright violation of international law and international human rights law.
South Africa has failed to champion the lives, dignity, and rights of marginalized and disadvantaged Africans consistently and comprehensively, favoring a politics of realpolitik and close relations with and support for authoritarian and discriminatory regimes, rather than the citizens they persecute.
When the former dictatorial president of Sudan, Omar Al Bashir, was on South African territory, South Africa was legally obligated to arrest him. Instead, it welcomed him and then allowed him to freely leave the country, in flagrant contempt of the rulings of the International Criminal Court, thus enabling him to evade prosecution for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. South Africa has protected genocidal leaders of the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi who have found shelter in South Africa. In this respect South Africa is not unique, many African countries have done the same as have many European countries. But this does not make South Africa's violation of human rights law any less egregious and consequential. Given also that South Africa set itself to very high human rights standards in its constitution, in the ANC's charter, and in its democratic aspirations, the contradiction between all of these guardians of human rights and South African government policy and practice is particularly acute.
South Africa's response to Russia's war crimes, crimes against humanity, and attacks on Ukrainian civilians because they are Ukrainians—which may ultimately be legally determined to be genocide—has been closely aligned with Russia's war of aggression, rather than in defense of the Ukrainian people.
South Africa's response to COVID has been thoroughly inadequate, with one of the highest morbidity and mortality rates in Africa and a high rate relative to other countries globally, yet with vastly greater healthcare resources, infrastructure, and budget than other African countries. Corruption siphoned off huge portions of funds ostensibly directed to addressing COVID.
While Iran engages in mass murder of Iranian civilians who protest the authoritarian Islamist theocracy and its institutional misogyny and systemic discrimination and violence against women, homophobia and discrimination against and persecution of religious minorities and atheists and agnostics, South Africa maintains close ties to the Iranian regime and is complicit in its human rights violations.
Reflecting with a historical perspective, in the very first weeks and months of South African democracy South Africa's government showed a profound lack of regard for the human rights of Rwandan Tutsis, who were being massacred in the Rwandan genocide. Thabo Mbeki would later acknowledge this failure, one with catastrophic consequences for one million Tutsis who were murdered in the genocide and tens of thousands of Hutu moderates who were murdered and targeted for the crime against humanity of extermination during the genocide in 1994. Black lives, whether South African, Rwandan, or Sudanese are not and have not been defended by the ANC historically or today, and its human rights failures impact Africans across the continent and are ongoing.
Human Rights Fulfillment and Achievements
It would be inaccurate and unfair not to acknowledge South Africa's achievements since 1994; they are significant, however constrained by failures of governance and extremely high levels of corruption. Education is an area where South Africa has made great strides, despite there still being great room for improvement. Universities in particular have massively expanded access to black and colored South Africans, and have very diverse student populations, in contrast to the apartheid era. Primary and secondary schooling has also improved substantially since the apartheid era, although it remains severely underfunded and is not actualizing the vision and aims of the ANC in 1994 and the initial decade following the advent of South African democracy. Housing has seen less dramatic improvements, with a huge percentage of black South Africans lacking safe and sanitary shelter. Civil and political rights remain South Africa strongpoints, although high levels of criminality within the ANC and violent attacks (including many killings) by factions within the ANC severely undermine the quality of South African democracy because rather than relying on the legal system and other democratic outlets to settle conflicts, violence is used in the context of corrupt state capture and elite efforts to monopolize sources of wealth.
Conclusion
It will be very hard for South Africa to address these human rights violations successfully until there are genuinely competitive elections in which no one party (until now, the ANC) can be assured of having a majority of seats in Parliament. Although an independent judiciary has been essential to preserving basic human rights in South Africa, it has had relatively little ability to reign in corruption in the executive and legislative branches of government. The courts’ ability to protect the human rights of South Africans—and especially black South Africans—has been far from satisfactory. There are limits to what the judiciary can do in any democracy, and these limits in South Africa's case do not necessarily reflect weaknesses within the judiciary, but within governance as a whole and with efforts to marginalize the judiciary and its impact on enforcing the law and constraining corruption.
The triumph of democracy in post-apartheid South Africa did not lead to the substantial and transformative pursuit of human rights both domestically and internationally, as was its promise. Like many national liberation movements, the ANC quickly became self-serving and internally focused on hoarding and monopolizing power and wealth, rather than sharing it with South Africans as a people and black South Africans in particular who had faced ruthless persecution and discrimination for over a century. Although South Africa did not suffer from civil war the way many African countries did in the years and decades immediately following decolonization, its extraordinarily high levels of lethal violence parallels the type of social fragmentation and collapse that accompanied many other African states consumed by violence in the aftermath of decolonization and conflict over national wealth and resources and control of governance.
Thirty years after the advent of democracy, the ANC has long since abandoned black South Africans and shows no signs of substantive and sustainable change to serve South Africa's citizens and respect its Constitution with integrity and accountability and to finally pursue policies that dismantle the legacies of racism that remain so powerfully present today in South Africa's economy, politics, and society more broadly. The ANC has squandered the immense respect in which it was held for defeating a racist, authoritarian apartheid regime. But it has entrenched and in many respects expanded the effects of apartheid, extending and deepening them systemically while not formally and explicitly. In that respect, South Africa is very far from liberated—both from racism and from poverty. What began as a deeply democratic movement has become increasingly authoritarian and oligarchic, at best a shadow of its former self, but in many respects something else entirely that is largely unrecognizable and a betrayal of its original moral principles, aims, and liberal democratic vision of governance and society for South Africa predicated on freedom, equality, and justice.
