Guest Blogger: Mia Swart

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Mia Swart (left) as today's guest blogger.

Mia's an Assistant Professor of Public International law and Global Justice at Leiden University, the Netherlands, from which she earned her Ph.D. in 2006. Under the supervision of Professor John Dugard and funded by Huygens and Mandela scholarships, she completed a thesis was on the topic of Judicial Lawmaking at the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals.
Mia's based at Leiden's Hague campus, affiliated with its law faculty and Grotius Centre. She also holds the title of Honorary Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she was previously worked as Associate Professor. She is also a research associate of the South African Institute of Advanced Constitutional, Public and International Law.

Published in the areas of transitional justice, international criminal law, and comparative constitutional law, Mia currently focuses her research on apartheid reparations. Her guest post below considers lessons learned from South Africa's apartheid era with respect to detention practices.
In 2007 and 2009, Mia received a Humboldt research fellowship to do research at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg and at Berlin's Humboldt University, from which she holds an LL.M. She worked as an intern in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001, the same year she was admitted as an attorney.
Mia chooses to honor as her foremother Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), a South African author, feminist, and antiwar campaigner about whom we've posted. Mia writes of Schreiner (below right):

She can be described as one of the most interesting and influential South African intellectuals of her time. She is most famous for her novel The Story of an African Farm, a novel portraying elementary life on the colonial frontier. The novel considered issues such as individualism and the treatment of women. She also wrote Women and Labour in which she argues that women and men should be treated and compensated equally in the workplace. She also argued for the rights of black people and other groups she perecived as being sidelined by British Imperialism. Although she is often described as a feminist and pacifist her true views escape categorisation. She was the deputy president of the Cape Town branch of the Women's Enfranchisement League. She was friends with Emily Hobhouse (a British nurse who protested against the treatment of Afrikaner women and children in British concentration camps during the Boer War) and with British intellectuals such as Mary Wollstonecraft.

Today Schreiner joins other foremothers -- including Mary Wollstonecraft -- on IntLawGrrls' list just below the "visiting from..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!

African lessons on terror detention

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post)

On 7 March President Barack Obama signed an executive order facilitating the indefinite detention of a group of Guantánamo prisoners. As IntLawGrrl Beth Van Schaack posted, the order introduces a new system of periodic review of Guantanamo prisoners as well as the resumption of military trials.
Human rights activists view this as a step backwards.
I believe South Africa's Apartheid experience has a special relevance and resonance for the so-called ‘war on terror’.
Much of the current concern regarding the impact of security legislation on human rights centers on the treatment of detainees in places of detention. "The Regulation of Detention in the Age of Terror - Lessons from the Apartheid Experience", an article that my co-author James Fowkes and I published in 2009 in the South African Law Journal, considered the regulation of detention during Apartheid to see what principles or lessons can be gleaned from that experience that can be useful for regulating detention in the context of terrorism.
Following a summary of the most important security legislation during Apartheid, the article examines the nature of the Guidelines and Measures for the Prohibition and Prevention of Torture, Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in Africa (Robben Island Guidelines). These Guidelines, drawn up in 2002 by the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (logo below left), aimed at the punishment and prevention of torture in Africa. It is the aim of the Robben Island Guidelines to assist African countries in designing systems that will be effective in combating torture. It is our contention that the Apartheid experience reveals several respects in which they are not an adequate guide. Whereas the monitoring mechanisms of the Guidelines should be taken seriously, they can be improved upon.
The paper examines the behaviour of the Apartheid judiciary and its performance in providing oversight of the executive’s actions. It then turns to consider the performance of the Apartheid judiciary in two areas key to court regulation of torture:
► The approach to the admissibility of evidence, and
► The weighing of fact in adjudicating torture allegations.
We conclude that even in authoritarian systems threats to national security (whether real or imaginary) seldom fall exclusively within the domain of the executive. It is therefore not naïve to believe that the law can have a positive effect on the way detainees are treated. We offer proposals in the article, as a contribution to the African effort to design systems that will be resilient to practices such as torture in security situations. We believe our proposals have a wider significance and can be a resource upon which lawyers all over the world can draw.

On March 9

On this day in ...
... 1951 (60 years ago today), Helen Zille (right) was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to parents who'd fled Nazi Germany. Formerly mayor of Cape Town, since 2009 she's been the Premier of the Western Cape and leader of the Democratic Alliance political party. Before entering the political arena, Zille was a journalist and anti-apartheid activist, noted for exposing the apartheid regime's coverup of the death of Steve Biko in police custody.

(Prior March 9 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On November 23

On this day in ...
... 1984, the U.N. General Assembly adopted Resolution 39/17, discussing the "Importance of the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination and of the speedy granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples for the effective guarantee and observance of human rights." Occasioning the restatement of the self-determination right were a laundry list of events: continuing apartheid in South Africa, occupation of Namibia and part of Angola by South Africa, and recent invasion of Lebanon by Israel.

(Prior November 23 posts are here, here, and here.)

On October 26

On this day in ...
... 1986, the government of South Africa threw out of the country Swiss nationals who were working for the International Committee of the Red Cross. The move came a day after South African delegates had been expelled from an ICRC conference in Geneva, Switzerland. The New York Times commented that South African had been kicked out of the ICRC meeting in an effort "to protest apartheid." But it speculated that the vote "could have the unintended effect of hurting opponents of apartheid," given that the workers ordered to leave had been visiting anti-apartheid campaigners "jailed for such crimes as treason and terrorism," among them "the black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela." (credit for photo of Mandela's cell at the prison on Robben Island, where the future South African President was incarcerated from 1964 to 1982.) The following month, South Africa reversed the expulsion order.

(Prior October 26 posts are here, here, and here.)

On September 9

On this day in ...
... 1985 (25 years ago today), via Executive Order 12532, entitled "Prohibiting Trade and Certain Other Transactions Involving South Africa," U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced that the United States was "adopting for the first time a set of modest punitive steps to press South Africa to renounce apartheid," The New York Times reported. The report underscored the acknowledgment of the Reagan Administration that the announcement constituted a "significantly altering" of Reagan's "often-stated policy of ''constructive engagement,'" advocated since Reagan's 1st election 5 years earlier, "to a new approach he called 'active constructive engagement.'" Behind the shift was a desire "to avoid foreign policy disarray abroad and political humiliation at home," according to The Times. The latter explicitly referred to Congress' apparent readiness to adopt harsher sanctions, a desire likely spurred by anti-apartheid protests, like that depicted above right, in the United States. (credit for 1985 photo)

(Prior September 9 posts are here, here, and here.)

On May 21

On this day in ...
... 1979 (30 years ago today), the newly formed National Assembly of Namibia abolished racial discrimination. The body was not recognized internationally, and Namibia (flag at left), which had been under control of South Africa's apartheid regime for much of the 20th century, would not gain full independence until 1990.
... 1997, the U.N. Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses was adopted. It sets out a framework for conservation of surface and groundwater that crosses international boundaries. The treaty has not yet entered into force. (credit for photo of Mekong River, which runs through China, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia)

(Prior May 21 posts are here and here.)

ATS aiding & abetting standard

Our colleague Julian Ku over at Opinio Juris seems concerned that in refusing to dismiss apartheid-related ATS claims (from Ntsebeza v. Daimler Chrysler Corp. and Khulumani v. Barclay National Bank Ltd. (prior posts), now combined in In re South African Apartheid Litigation) against multinational corporations (including GM, Ford, and IBM), Judge Shira Scheindlin (left, credit)"rejected the stricter ICC standard requiring assistance for the 'purpose' of committing the criminal activity in favor of a looser assistance with the 'knowledge' of criminal activity standard." I haven't yet read Judge Scheindlin's reasoning (summary here), but would point out two good reasons for rejecting any ICC standard. First, the ATS provides only for tort liability. Though defendants are tried for international crimes, tort burdens of proof are used and defendants benefit from none of the defense rights associated with a criminal trial. It is therefore appropriate to use a tort standard rather than a criminal standard. Second, as Judge Stephen Reinhardt reasoned in his concurring opinion to Unocal (with respect to the standard to be used for complicity), since the ATS's purpose is to provide a federal tort remedy for the international crimes at issue, interests are better served by using well developed, tried and true federal tort standards. Qualifying as ancillary the issue of which standard to use - federal or international, Reinhardt (below right, credit)wrote:

It is precisely in order to implement the policies underlying Congress’s decision to make the violation of international law a federal tort, that it is necessary to flesh out the statute and apply federal common law; here, we must do so in order to fashion a remedy with respect to the direct or indirect involvement of third parties in the commission of the underlying tort. . . .

[T]he question of when third-party liability arises is a straightforward legal matter that federal courts routinely resolve using common law principles. ... [T]ransnational matters are litigated in federal court, using federal legal standards, more and more frequently as the pace of globalization grows ever more rapid. Nor is there any reason to apply international law to the question of third-party liability simply because international law applies to the substantive violation; . . . federal common law is properly invoked when the statute at issue leaves an ancillary question unanswered, regardless of the nature of the statute. In short, federal common law principles provide the traditional and time-tested method of filling in the interstices and resolving the type of ancillary legal questions presented by this case.

In my view, courts should not substitute international law principles for established federal common law or other domestic law principles . . . unless a statute mandates that substitution, or other exceptional circumstances exist. . . . [The ATCA makes] it plain that certain provisions require the application of international law. In other instances, I believe it prudent to follow the general rules established by the Supreme Court regarding the use of federal common law. It is important to recognize that there is a distinction between substituting international law for federal common law and making proper use of international law as part of federal common law. Employing federal common law does not force courts to ignore a constructive or helpful rule adopted under international law, because in appropriate circumstances federal common law incorporates relevant principles of international law. The Paquette Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 700 (1900); see also n. 7, infra. Thus, the benefits of the vast experience embodied in federal common law as well as any useful international law principles are obtained when we employ the traditional common law approach ordinarily followed by federal courts. Those benefits are lost, however, when we substitute for the wide body of federal authority and reasoning, as the majority does here, an undeveloped principle of international law promulgated by a recently-constituted ad hoc international tribunal

Judge Reinhardt was of course referring to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the only tribunal at the time (and perhaps still today?) to have actually used the standard then at issue. Even if third-party liability standards gain in clarity as they are further developed in other tribunals and at the ICC, I think Judge Reinhardt is right: criminal standards for criminal liability, "looser" tort standards for tort liabilty.

Remembering Sharpeville

Today, March 21, is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The day marks the 1960 massacre of nearly 70 people in the Sharpeville township outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, about which IntLawGrrl Diane Marie Amann also posts below.
The 69 persons who died and the 300 who were injured had joined tens of thousands in a peaceful protest of the apartheid regime’s oppressive pass laws; then police “deliberately opened fire on the unarmed crowd.” (credit for photo captioned "Protestors fleeing the Sharpeville Police Station, 21 March 1960")
The U.N. General Assembly declared the day one of remembrance and action in 1966, calling on the international community “eliminate racial discrimination and apartheid.”
Yet more than 50 years after that declaration Navanethem Pillay (below right), the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and herself a native of Natal, South Africa (prior post), reports that “millions of people around the world . . . are still, today, victims of racism and racial discrimination.” Just last year, as IntLawGrrl Jaya Ramji-Nogales posted then, Gay McDougall, the U.N. Independent Expert on minority issues, and Githu Muigai, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance, called for an end to “anti-Roma sentiment and violence” in Europe. And in the United States, African Americans are reportedly more than 10 times likely to be sent to prison than whites for drug offenses.
Frustratingly, amid this climate of ever-present global racism, states have failed to reach consensus regarding the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, a comprehensive international program of action aimed preventing racial discrimination. The declaration was the result of the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, which, though intended to “create a new world vision for the fight against racism in the twenty-first century," was nearly derailed by disagreement regarding Israeli-Palestinian relations.
In the 8 years since Durban, negotiations around the declaration have been fraught with conflict between the parties, particularly with respect to Israel and religious defamation. Next month, from April 20 to 24, country and NGO representatives will convene at the Durban Review Conference in an effort to surmount these challenges and agree on the declaration’s text. To that end, a preparatory committee of UN member states and NGOs recently revised its draft outcome document for the conference by shortening it and converting it into a “rolling text” in hopes of breathing new momentum and confidence into the negotiations. Highlights of the rolling text include calls:
► for U.N. member states to contribute to a Trust Fund for the Programme of the Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination;
► for special attention to women, refugees and migrant workers suffering from racism and racial discrimination; and
► for renewed calls for ratification and removal of reservations to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination.
Reflecting upon the document and the challenges facing conference negotiators, Commissioner Pillay, about whom IntLawGrrl Fiona de Londras also posts today, said:

I urge all states to refrain from taking narrow politicized or polemical stances on particular issues, and to work together for the remainder of the process towards a successful outcome for the victims of racial discrimination and intolerance around the world.

On March 21

On this day in ...
... 1857, Alice Henry (left) was born in Melbourne, Australia, to parents who had emigrated from Scotland. Following a brief stint as a schoolteacher she began writing features for the Melbourne Argus and its magazine, the Australian, a job she held for neatly 20 years. Henry became active in politics, opposing imperialism and lecturing on women's rights, temperance, and labor rights. She went to England in 1905 and the United States in 1906. In Chicago she became the office secretary of the local Women's Trade Union League and was active in Progressive movement. She wrote, edited, or published a number of journals and books, all relating to women and the labor movement. Henry died in 1943 in Melbourne, having returned to her birthplace a decade earlier.

... 1960, the BBC reported, "More than 50 black people were killed when police opened fire on a 'peaceful' protest in the South African township of Sharpeville." The report continued: "Eye-witnesses said men, women and children fled 'like rabbits' as up to 300 officers began randomly shooting into a 5,000-strong crowd outside the municipal offices in Sharpeville," located southest of Johannesburg. In all, 69 persons were killed and 180 wounded. Soon after the apartheid government: banned many public meetings; banned the opposition Pan Africanist Congress and the African National Congress; and declared a state of emergency. "No police officer involved in the massacre was ever convicted." Today IntLawGrrl Amy Senier considers Sharpeville's legacy in her post above.

(Prior March 21 posts are here and here.)

On February 10

On this day in ...
... 2005, African National Congress member and activist Sophia Williams-De Bruyn was appointed the deputy speaker of the legislature of Gauteng, South Africa's 2d most populous province, home to the country's capital, Johannesburg. (photo credit) Born in 1938, Williams-De Bruyn entered a textile factory as a young girl, and soon became a labor activist; eventually she would help to found South Africa's Congress of Trade Unions. In 1955, she was appointed full-time organizer of the Coloured People's Congress. The following year Williams-De Bruyn, "then barely 18," helped lead 20,000 women in a march against the apartheid government's pass laws. Today, as a legislative leader, she works for gender equality.
... 1955, the U.S. Navy evacuated the Tachen Islands off of China's coast. Using "used 132 boats and 400 aircraft," it transported "14,500 civilians, 10,000 Nationalist troops and 4,000 guerrillas, along with 40,000 tons of military equipment and supplies," to what the BBC called "the anti-Communist, Nationalist power-base of Formosa (now called Taiwan)." The evacuation began a day a day after the U.S. Senate approved the Mutual Defense Treaty Between the United States and the Republic of China and a day before President Harry S. Truman ratified the document, which did not entered into force until March 3. The Tachens soon were seized by Communist troops; Nationalists remain on Taiwan (left) to this day.

On February 2

On this day in ...
... 1897, 23-year-old Clara Brett Martin (right) was called to the bar in Ontario, Canada. The 1st woman to receive a law degree from the University of Toronto thus became the 1st woman lawyer in the British Empire. The Toronto Telegram reported on her swearing-in as a barrister thusly:

She wore a black gown over a black dress and the regulation white tie and bore her honours modestly.

Both Martin's fearlessness and foibles are detailed here. (image credit)
... 1990, in a televised speech at Cape Town, South African President F.W. de Klerk rescinded a 3-decade-old ban on the African National Congress (logo at left), the country's "leading anti-apartheid group." De Klerk also suggested that he might some day release the group's imprisoned leader, Nelson Mandela -- as indeed he did 9 days later.

A Tribute to Helen Suzman

Helen Suzman, a lion of the anti-apartheid movement, died peacefully at her home in Johannesburg yesterday at the age of 91. South Africa's flags will fly at half-mast on Sunday to mourn her passing, a fitting tribute to an "indomitable" and "stroppy" "powerhouse against apartheid", in the words of Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Suzman, a member of South Africa's Parliament from the wealthy Johannesburg district of Houghton from 1953 until 1989, used her position to fight tirelessly against apartheid, often as a sole dissenting voice -- the "cricket in the thorn tree", as she was known. She served thirteen years as the sole liberal MP, six of those as the only female amongst 165 male MPs. Despite these daunting circumstances, Suzman continually stood up for justice and equality:

Helen's reputation was built not on lofty thoughts and resounding speeches, but on hard work. One by one, as they came off the assembly line, she shredded the bills that removed civil liberties. One by one, she tore her parliamentary colleagues apart for their callousness, ignorance and ineptitude. Day after day, she would meet the poor, either in her office, or more often in their own shacks, listening to their tales of sorrow and sadness, of hurt and hatred.

With typical chutzpah, she would accost ministers in the parliamentary lobby or beard police officers in their dens, and demand to know why some nameless person of colour was being deprived of his or her rights.

In Suzman's own words, "I am provocative, and I admit this. It isn't as if I'm only on the receiving end, a poor, frail little creature. I can be thoroughly nasty when I get going, and I don't pull my punches." The world will be a poorer place without those punches, though Suzman's fighting spirit will continue to inspire us to speak out against injustice and agitate for change.

On December 2

On this day in ...

... 1823 (185 years ago today), in his 7th annual message to Congress, U.S. President James Monroe declared:

[T]he occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers ...

This Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed with respect not only to the United States but also to countries throughout North and South America, has persisted as a tenet of U.S. foreign policy. A contemporary invocation occurred in December 1984, when Dr. Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense, who's slated to remain so in the next administration (as posted above), but then Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote a letter to his superior in which he cited the doctrine to justify U.S. support for the contras who were fighting Nicaragua's Sandinista government.

... 1977, the chief magistrate of Pretoria accepted findings that South African security forces were not to blame for the death of Steve Biko, 30, the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement who "died of extensive brain injuries sustained" 5 days after "a scuffle with police" who were interrogating and detaining him. No trial ever has been held respecting the apartheid-era incident, described in jarring detail in Donald Woods' book Biko (1978) and depicted in the film Cry Freedom (1987).

On November 20

On this day in ...
... 1893 (115 years ago today), in United States v. Rodgers, the U.S. Supreme Court analyzed centuries of state practice by colonizing powers such as Portugal, Spain, and Britain in the course of holding that "the open, uninclosed waters of the Great Lakes (above right), between which the Detroit river is a connecting stream," constituted the "high seas." Accordingly, the Court ruled that a U.S. statute gave the federal court in Michigan jurisdiction to try the defendant, alleged to have committed assault with a dangerous weapon on a ship "in the Detroit river, out of the jurisdiction of any particular state, and within the territorial limits of the dominion of Canada." Two dissenting judges maintained that only Canada had jurisdiction over the offense.
... 1923 (85 years ago today), Nadine Gordimer (below left) was born in South Africa, where she has lived all her life. Educated at a convent school, Gordimer attended Witwaterstrand University for 1 year before devoting herself to writing. Her subject is the transformation of South Africa during her lifetime:

Nadine Gordimer's subject matter in the past has been the effect of apartheid on the lives of South Africans and the moral and psychological tensions of life in a racially-divided country, which she often wrote about by focusing on oppressed non-white characters. She was an ardent opponent of apartheid and refused to accommodate the system, despite growing up in a community in which it was accepted as normal. Her work has therefore served to chart, over a number of years, the changing response to apartheid in South Africa.

As we've posted, Gordimer was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Thank you, Miriam

As a child of the 1980s, I first heard the music of Miriam Makeba (left) after she performed with Paul Simon on his Graceland tour, but she became a household name when she appeared on the Cosby Show in 1991.

Her music is still a part of my daily life. "Pata Pata," Makeba's best-known hit (1967 video performance at the bottom of this post), happens to be a fabulous cha-cha. My dance partner and I have it in our favorite warm-up mix, and often argue about the song's interpretation. While it is a truly "fun" song, we disagree because she is actually listening to the music -- the playful, bouncing melody -- and I am listening to Makeba's struggle underlying it. I lose the argument every time, but Makeba's music truly expresses a myriad of emotions. As Nelson Mandela put it following Makeba's death last week:

Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.

While Makeba resisted being called an activist, she became a symbolic voice for the struggle against apartheid. Born in Johannesburg in 1932, Makeba began her singing career blending jazz and traditional South African music in the 1950s. In 1959, after starring in anti-apartheid documentary Come-back Africa, the regime revoked Makeba's citizenship. Thrust into exile, Makeba spent the following 31 years living between the United States, Guinea and Europe. Americans were comfortable with Makeba when her politics concerned South Africa. In 1963, during a period when her career flourished in the United States, Makeba testified without incident before the United Nations about the situation in her homeland, saying "the time had come for all mankind to act with firmness to stop those mad rulers from dragging the country into a horrifying disaster." But when Makeba married Stokely Carmichael, a black activist working with the leaders of the American civil rights movement, the American public turned their backs on her, despite Makeba's assertions that the relationship was not political. Her bookings were cancelled and her career ended in the United States -- until South Africa became a hot topic in the 1980s.

In a seeming dual exile, Makeba went to Guinea. She served as the country's UN Representative and won the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize in 1986 for her work in this position. After another move, this time to Belgium, Makeba was finally able to return home to South Africa in 1990.

A citizen of the world, yet a citizen of nowhere, Makeba insisted:

I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can't do anything about that.

This world, that punished her during most of her life for that truth, will always be indebted to her for it.

'Nuff said

(Occasional item taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'They asked our forgiveness. Ntobeko told us that when we forgave him, he didn't care if he got amnesty because he had just been freed.'

-- Californian Linda Biehl, recalling her 1st conversation, just outside the hearing room of the South African Truth and Reconcilitation Commission, with Ntobeko Peni, a member of the mob who killed her 26-year-old daughter Amy Biehl (left), a Fulbright scholar and anti-apartheid activist caught up in racial violence in 1993, the year before the country's 1st multiracial elections. The quote appears in a Los Angeles Times article on the twists of fate by which Peni and another man who served time for the killing now work for the charitable Foundation established in Amy's memory. (photo credit)
A story worth contemplating as we mull yesterday's excellent post by IntLawGrrl Jaya Ramji-Nogales, respecting the proliferation of truth commissions on the African continent.

On August 18

On this day in ...
... 1848 (160 years ago today), in Argentina, in "a paltry prison town in the northwest of Buenos Aires province," a firing squad shot to death Camila O'Gorman, 20 years old and 8 months pregnant. The 5th of 6 children "in an upper class family of mixed Irish, French, and Spanish descent," as a teenager she began an affair with the family's friend and priest, Ladislao Gutiérrez. When the affair became public O'Gorman shocked all by "claimed that it had been she who had initiated the affair and insisted on their elopement." O'Gorman (left) and her lover were executed as charges of "moral corruption" swirled around the regime in power.
... 1964, having failed to meet an International Olympic Committee demand that it condemn apartheid, South Africa was banned from taking part in the 18th Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. The country did not renounce apartheid until 1991, and so the ban remained in place until the 1992 Games in Barcelona.

On August 9

On this day in ...

... 1945, the United States dropped a 2d atomic bomb on a Japanese city. Dubbed "'Fat Man" in a reference to Winston Churchill," Britain's Prime Minister, this bomb destroyed nearly "30% of Nagasaki, including almost all the industrial district." As for casualties, "nearly 74,000 were killed and a similar number injured." It came 3 days after the 1st atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. (credit for before and after aerial photos of Nagasaki)

... 1956, more than 20,000 women marched through Pretoria to protest the pass laws -- legislation that required blacks to carry passports to enter areas the apartheid government had set aside for whites. Leaders of the multiracial demonstration included Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Albertina Sisulu, and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn. The event is commemorated every year on this date, as National Women's Day in South Africa. (photo credit)

On August 2

On this day in ...

... 1963 (45 years ago today), Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, said at the Security Council (right) that his country opposed sanctions against South Africa on the ground that sanctions were "bad law and bad policy," but added that the United States would stop selling military matériel to the apartheid regime by year's end.

... 1984, a British businessman won his legal action when the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Malone v. United Kingdom that governmental tapping of his phone constituted a breach of Article 8 of Europe's human rights convention, which guarantees that "[e]veryone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence."