Sunday, September 13, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
RIGHTS: Apartheid Victims Sue International Businesses
Emad Mekay
- Lawyers of victims of the former apartheid government in South Africa are suing several international companies and banks that allegedly backed and aided the racist regime in its crimes against humanity.
In a press conference in Washington on Tuesday, lawyers said that the case would seek to hold those companies accountable for helping the former white rulers of South Africa commit crimes that included forced labour, extra-judicial killing, torture, sexual assault, and unlawful detention.
The case, filed Monday before a New York court, argues that IBM, for example, provided the computers that enabled South Africa to create the much hated ”pass book system” – a law forcing non-whites to carry documents stating their legal residence and workplace – and to control the black South African population.
Car manufacturers like Ford and General Motors provided the armoured vehicles that were used to patrol the townships. Arms manufacturers violated United Nations embargoes on sales to South Africa, as did oil companies, says the suit.
Foreign banks provided the funding that enabled South Africa to expand its police and security apparatus, it adds.
The white regime had designed grand ”social engineering schemes”, which segregated the races and forced hundreds of thousands of non-white people to relocate.
To prove that black rule led to chaos, white governments also promoted instability in neighbouring countries. They went so far as to poison and bomb opponents, according to the suit.
The apartheid era ended in 1994 with the election of black president Nelson Mandela but many victims of apartheid in the country of 44 million people have complained that government reparations have been slow in coming.
The case, filed before a New York court, is based on a U.S. statute that grants U.S. courts jurisdiction over certain violations of international law, regardless of where they occur, said Agnieszka Fryszman, a lawyer with the U.S. law firm of Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, P.L.L.C.
Recent successful suits under this statute include the Doe versus Unocal case, which held that the oil and natural gas producer was responsible for human rights abuses perpetrated by the Myanmar military in connection with the company’s 1.2 billion dollar oil pipeline project there.
In the Unocal case, the court held that a corporation that aided and abetted human rights violations by a sovereign foreign state can be held liable for those abuses, said Fryszman.
The case also echoes liability principles first imposed on corporate participants in crimes against humanity by the Nuremberg Tribunal, which followed the Second World War. At Nuremberg, the bankers that financed Germany’s Third Reich government were held answerable for crimes against humanity.
Fryszman, who was also involved in reparations cases launched by Holocaust survivors, said that her firm also represents the South African Khulumani support group, which has 33,000 members, along with 82 individual victims of the former regime.
According to the case summary, ”extra-judicial killings, torture, and arbitrary detention are recognised violations of international law and all of these were practiced by the apartheid regime in South Africa between 1960 and 1993. Apartheid itself was recognised as a crime against humanity.”
Lead counsel Michael D. Hausfeld said in a statement that ”apartheid was an institutionalised system of racial disenfranchisement, forced labour, and criminal domination. It sought to and did exploit and degrade the black South African population for a criminal purpose, through criminal means”.
When asked how much money the suit seeks, Fryszman said ”it would be up to the jury”.
The case also comes only months after U.S. attorney Ed Fagan sued Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse on behalf of South African clients for similar charges. Fagan said he modelled his case on claims by Holocaust survivors, which netted a whopping 1.25 billion dollars.
If successful, the case could deter companies and international banks from doing business with governments and regimes known for exploitation, human rights abuses or racist policies – for long a central demand of anti-corporate globalisation activists
The corporations named in the suit include weighty banks in Switzerland, Britain, Germany, and the United States, and companies headquartered in the Netherlands and France.
They are: U.S.-based, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, ExxonMobil, Caltex Petroleum, Fluor Corporation, Ford Motor Corporation, General Motors and IBM; in Germany, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, DaimlerChrysler, and Rheinmetall; Switzerland-based Credit Suisse and UBS; in Britain, Barclays Bank, British Petroleum and Fujitsu ICL; French company TotalFinaElf and Royal Dutch Shell of the Netherlands.
Print
|
RIGHTS: Apartheid Victims Sue International Businesses
Emad Mekay
- Lawyers of victims of the former apartheid government in South Africa are suing several international companies and banks that allegedly backed and aided the racist regime in its crimes against humanity.
(more…)
Print
|
