George Bizos, was an anti-apartheid campaigner and human rights lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela during the decades-long struggle for South Africa’s freedom. An incisive legal mind and architect of South African constitution, he contributed immensely to independent South African democracy when he joined other lawyers in the 90s, in court proceedings to formally approve South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution, regarded as one of the most liberal in the world.
Bizos was born in 1927 in Vasil... moreGeorge Bizos, was an anti-apartheid campaigner and human rights lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela during the decades-long struggle for South Africa’s freedom. An incisive legal mind and architect of South African constitution, he contributed immensely to independent South African democracy when he joined other lawyers in the 90s, in court proceedings to formally approve South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution, regarded as one of the most liberal in the world.
Bizos was born in 1927 in Vasilitisi, a village in the southern Peloponnese, Greece where his father Antonios was the mayor. He arrived in South Africa aged 13, in 1941 after he and his father fled the Nazi occupation of Greece in a small rowboat that drifted in the Mediterranean Sea for days before being picked up by a British destroyer. After struggling to learn Afrikaans and English while working as a shop assistant, and after scraping together tuition money, George Bizos enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he met Nelson Mandela a fellow student and the two became lifelong friends. He completed his law degree in 1950, two years after the National Party came to power and began codifying apartheid. He was admitted to the Johannesburg bar in 1954.
Working with two other lawyers; Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, who went on to lead the A.N.C, Bizos represented clients in obscure rural places in cases that revealed the minutiae as much as the ubiquity of laws devised to keep the races apart. It was in those early cases that George Bizos confronted the central paradox of his chosen profession. Bizos represented Mandela and fellow anti-apartheid activist Walter Sisulu in the historic Treason Trial, which started in 1956 and ended in 1961 with the acquittal of all the defendants. He then represented Mandela at the 1963 Rivonia Trial when Mandela and others were sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of seeking to overthrow the apartheid government. He is credited with adding the words "if needs be" to Mandela's famous speech at the trial, in which he said he was prepared to die and avoid the death sentence. Over the years, he also defended numerous political activists, including anti-apartheid icon Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the families of Black Consciousness Movement hero Steve Biko and freedom fighter Chris Hani. Bizos also represented Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who in 2004 was acquitted of treason, on charges of plotting to kill then-President Robert Mugabe.
George Bizos remained active and outspoken into his tenth decade. After retirement in 1990, he joined the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), a prominent firm of human rights lawyers in Johannesburg, as senior counsel in its Constitutional Litigation Unit. As part of the LRC, Bizos appeared before the Marikana Commission of Inquiry and represented some of the families of the 34 striking mine workers killed by police in August 2012 and secured government payouts for their families. He also represented families of anti-apartheid activists who had been killed during apartheid at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
In 1986, while still in prison, Mr. Mandela chose Mr. Bizos as his confidential emissary to brief exiled members of the A.N.C. on secret negotiations with the Afrikaner authorities. He received many rewards for his lifelong struggle for justice. In 1999, Mandela – who in 1994 had become South Africa’s first Black president – gave Bizos the Order for Meritorious Service. In his later years, particularly after the death of Mr. Mandela in 2013, Mr. Bizos expressed disappointment and disillusion with South Africa’s swerve toward corruption and misrule two decades after its first fully democratic elections in 1994. “We have failed to live up to the vision of Mandela,” Mr. Bizos said at a memorial for the former president in December 2013.
