ABSTRACT
This chapter presents to a better understanding of the crime and adds to the legal discussion on its applicability, also for future cases of apartheid. It reviews apartheid’s origin in South Africa and its criminalisation, initially as a breach of the prohibition of racial discrimination, later as a crime against humanity ipso facto through the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute. The application of the law of apartheid to contemporary situations is, however, dependent on an understanding of race unrelated to the South African context. South Africa’s Prime Minister, Daniel Malan, first used the term ‘apartheid’, which means ‘apartness’ or ‘separateness’ in Afrikaans, in 1944 to denote the country’s policies of racial segregation between whites and various non-white racial groups. Apartheid was an institutionalized system, created by law, enforced by legal institutions, and built on the three pillars of discrimination, territorial fragmentation, and political repression.
