“Restoring hope where all hope was lost”: Nelson Mandela, the ICRC and the protection of political detainees in apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Amidst the violent upheavals of the end of empire and the Cold War, international organizations developed a basic framework for holding State and non-State armed groups to account for their actions when taking prisoners. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) placed itself at the very centre of these developments, making detention visiting a cornerstone of its work. Nowhere was this growing preoccupation with the problem of protecting detainees more evident than apartheid South Africa, where the ICRC undertook more detention visits than in almost any other African country. During these visits the ICRC was drawn into an internationalized human rights dispute that severely tested its leadership and demonstrated the troubled rapport between humanitarianism and human rights. The problems seen in apartheid South Africa reflect today's dilemmas of how to protect political detainees in situations of extreme violence. We can look to the past to find solutions for today's political detainees − or “security detainees” as they are now more commonly called.

Understanding conflict penality: Dominant themes and the case of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

“…The fifth and final theme is the strategic use of punishment for managing the conflict in ways that compromise penal rationales, such as prevention and retribution. In both Northern Ireland and South Africa, international pressure and the challenge of keeping prisons orderly resulted in a pragmatic managerial approach, where staff negotiated with prisoners on their conditions (McEvoy, 2001;Thompson, 2016). Such policy supported political organisations in prisons, which worked against preventive and retributivist penal rationales.…”

Out of Sight, out of Mind? Exposing the human cost of detention

“…Mandela and his fellow detainees in apartheid-era South Africa. 34 This issue also contains a report, taken from the ICRC Archives, about the visit to Robben Island that took place on 1 May 1964, which was sent to the South African authorities and was confidential at the time. 35 In 2016, the ICRC visited 1,650 places of detention in ninety-eight countries.…”