ABSTRACT
Introduction The crime of apartheid was defined by the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as inhumane acts of a character similar to other crimes against humanity ‘committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime’. The white supremacist policy of racial domination, oppression and segregation was institutionalised in South Africa through a plethora of laws demonstrating how laws are formulated in the interests of those in power. Apartheid legislation had as its aim to permeate, control and distort all facets of life in South Africa and, through criminal justice as its agent, the apartheid regime orchestrated the most inhumane racial oppression. In addition to gross human rights violations under state security legislation (detention without trial, torture and killings) research showed (Peacock, 1991; Shaw, 1996; Slabbert, 1980) that during this time of racial oppression South Africa had the highest prison population per capita in the world, of which 80 per cent were short-term prisoners – most of them incarcerated under the pass laws. Pass laws, or the enforced physical segregation between different racial groups and restriction of the movement of Africans in so-called ‘white only areas’, illustrate that which constitutes ‘unacceptable social injuries’ and ‘acceptable controls’ are relative notions shaped by the underlying constructions of social organisation, namely the production and distribution of economic, political and cultural capital (Barak, Flavin and Leighton, 2001). At the heart of the massive violations of human rights within the apartheid state was the need for a cheap and a readily available supply of labour to ensure the continued exploitation of the country’s great mineral wealth by the white elite. The success of the diamond and gold mines was made possible by the systematic dispossession, impoverishment and proletarianisation by the African population (Hansson and Van Zyl Smit, 1990).
