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Salient: Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Vol. 32, No. 9. 1969.

S.A. Rule of Law Eroded, Report says

S.A. Rule of Law Eroded, Report says

Salient has received a press release from the International Commission of Jurists about a commission report on "The Erosion of the Rule of Law in South Africa".

The statement provides the commission's official attitude to South Africa's legal system.

The head of the New Zealand branch is Sir Richard Wild.

The statement is as follows:

A State in which a small minority of little more than three million whites rule over nearly fifteen million people of a different colour and racial origin is in itself an anomaly. Such a situation is all the more shocking when the majority are not only completely unrepresented in the Government and Parliament of the State but are the constant targets of victimisation and exploitation by the small white racialist minority. In the twentieth century this is a situation which obviously cannot exist.

Under the "Sacred Trust" to use the word of the Mandate given by the League of Nations to the Union of South Africa in 1920, South Africa was given the control and administration of South West Africa, a territory comprising 320,000 square miles and a population of 554,000, of whom only 69.000 are white. The mandate imposed the obligation upon South Africa to promote to the utmost the material and moral well-being and social progress of the inhabitants. Because of the complete failure of South Africa to comply with the obligations, the United Nations in October 1966 revoked the mandate given to South Africa. Thus South Africa is now in illegal occupation of this territory.

To what extent are the principles of the "Rule of Law" being applied in South Africa itself and in the South West African Territories, which it continues to occupy in defiance of the United Nations? This is the subject of a report just published by the International Commission of Jurists.

The report, "The Erosion of the Rule of Law in South Africa," consists practically exclusively of quotations from laws and judicial pronounce merits emanating from South African sources. The inevitable conclusion derived from this systematic actual analysis of the South African legal system as applied to non-whites in South Africa and South West Africa is that the "Rule of Law" has been so eroded and perverted as to become itself" an adjunct of a tyranny based on racial discrimination.

In the Report one finds confirmation of what the Interna-

Continued p. 3