Albie Sachs

Albie Sachs is a South African lawyer, anti-apartheid activist, writer and former judge, born in Johannesburg on 30 January 1935. He began practising as an advocate at 21 and defended people prosecuted under apartheid laws, and he was detained without trial and held in solitary confinement before being forced into exile in 1966. He lived in England, where he completed a doctorate at Sussex University and lectured in law at Southampton, and then in Mozambique, where he taught law in Maputo and worked in the Ministry of Justice. In 1988 a car bomb in Maputo cost him his right arm and the sight of one eye, and he answered it with what he called soft vengeance, working toward a non-racial, democratic South Africa under the rule of law. He drafted a code of conduct for the African National Congress that forbade torture, helped draft its Bill of Rights proposals and sat on its National Executive Committee from 1991. In 1994 Nelson Mandela appointed him a founding member of South Africa's Constitutional Court, where he served fifteen years until he retired in October 2009.