On behalf of our Founder, Chairperson, Trustees and staff we extend our heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of the Hon Arthur Chaskalson, who passed away earlier today.
Advocate Arthur Chaskalson and our Founder, Mr Nelson Mandela, walked a long road together, from the Rivonia Trial through to the advent of democracy in South Africa and beyond.
Mr Mandela appointed him in 1994 as the first President of the Constitutional Court, and between 2001 and 2005 he served as South Africa’s Chief Justice.
Mr Chaskalson was part of Mr Mandela’s defence team in the 1963-64 Rivonia Trial for sabotage, in which he and seven others were sentenced to life imprisonment. He and his colleagues persuaded Advocate Bram Fischer to lead the defence and together they grappled with the possibility that the accused might be sentenced to death.
As Mr Mandela said in 1995:
“They put tremendous pressure on him by using the argument that there was no other advocate in the country who could say that we had done nothing more than what his people, the Afrikaners, had done in 1914, and that despite the loss of life in that rebellion, there were no death sentences; that if people were to die, there would never be reconciliation between black and white in South Africa.”
Throughout his life Mr Chaskalson worked on the legal defence of opponents of apartheid and in 1978 helped to establish the Legal Resources Centre, of which Mr Mandela once said: “This remarkable institution perhaps did more than any other in the 1970s and 1980s to challenge executive abuses, and to be a legal voice for the voiceless.”
We send our condolences to Lorraine, Matthew and Jerome.