Special Report Transcript Episode 87, Section 4, Time 49:19

‘On the refusal of judges to appear before the TRC’ // We suffer still in South Africa from a view that judges somehow, just because they have become judges, are set on a pedestal and beyond criticism. I can quite understand the importance of their independence, but they speak as if they are not first of all human beings, human beings who are formed by the society in which they live. But there are people who came out of homes that regarded black people as not equal to white people. Now, a person coming out of that situation, going to a church that said apartheid was right, going to schools that merely reinforced those views. It would be very very odd that such a person would suddenly be totally uninfluenced by the milieu from which he came and one would have hoped that we could have had a judiciary that said ”we are accountable, I mean despite our independence,” and that doesn’t affect their independence. And that would have been something that would have made people feel … because I have to say that I have still got to recover a respect for the judiciary of this country, just myself as a black person, knowing the collusion that there was between many judges and the government. And let us say that there were judges who didn’t do all of those things, but precisely because, and I would say that those who resisted – who spoke out against the unjust judicial decisions – were a minority. The vast majority in the experience of black people, in our perception, were people who were supportive of the system. And it would have been a wonderful balm to hear some of them say, even collectively, we are sorry that we did not speak out when we could have spoken out.

Notes: Archbishop Tutu

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