OPINION: FW De Klerk has a case to answer
On June 19, the UN Human Rights Council mandated the High Commissioner for Human Rights to examine systemic racism against Africans and people of African descent by law enforcement agencies in the US and beyond, following the killing of George Floyd.
As a result of these efforts, the 1968 Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitation to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity explicitly includes “inhuman acts resulting from the policy of apartheid” as international crimes that it can never be too late to prosecute. This was the first time the crime against humanity of apartheid was included in an international treaty.
Dr King himself had connected the US role in South-east Asia with what was happening in south-west Georgia and East Harlem in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech in April 1967. There can be no doubt that De Klerk is singularly unfit to speak at a conference about “Lessons Learnt, Courage and Conscience, Social Change and Racism”.
In 1998, he took the commission to the Western Cape High Court to prevent it from revealing his role in the Khotso House bombings. These findings were eventually published by the commission in 2003. Had the commission addressed the issue through the lens of international criminal law, it would likely have made a finding of criminal accountability as well.
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