Albie Sachs

Origins and early life

Albie Sachs was born in Johannesburg on 30 January 1935, the son of the trade unionist Solly Sachs and of Ray Ginsberg, and he grew up with his mother in Cape Town. Both his parents were Lithuanian Jews who had reached South Africa as children, their families fleeing the persecution of Jews in the Russian Empire, and they raised him in a strictly secular home; he calls himself a very secular person, proud to identify as a Jew.

He began law at the University of Cape Town at fifteen, joined the Defiance Campaign in 1952, attended the Congress of the People at Kliptown in 1955, and at twenty-one became an advocate defending people charged under racist laws.

Work and career

The security police banned him and twice held him without trial in solitary confinement, 168 days in all, which he told in The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, published in 1966, the year he went into exile. He spent eleven years in England, where he took a doctorate at Sussex in 1970 and taught law, then eleven in Mozambique as a law professor, and with Oliver Tambo he helped draft the ANC code of conduct that forbade torture.

On 7 April 1988, in Maputo, a bomb placed in his car by South African security agents cost him his right arm and the sight of one eye. His answer was what he called soft vengeance, a non-racial democracy founded on human rights and the rule of law, told in The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter in 1990, the year he came home to work on the new constitution. After the first democratic elections in 1994, Nelson Mandela appointed him to the new Constitutional Court, where he sat until 2009 and wrote judgments on the voting rights of prisoners and on people threatened with eviction from their homes.

He also helped shape the Court's building on the site of the Old Fort Prison and its art collection, and in 2014 he received the Tang Prize in Rule of Law.