“Our case is not only about the apartheid past, but also about how companies behave in general in countries where human rights are violated,” says lawyer Abrahams. (Can you say China? — Ed.)
Mpho Masemola has pieces of shrapnel in his skull. So many that no doctor dares try to remove them. They have been there since the early nineteen eighties.
That was when Mpho Masemola, still in secondary school, got involved in the underground struggle against the apartheid regime. During a riot, police drove him and a number of other activists into a house. Once they were inside, the house was fired upon from all sides. He had not yet finished secondary school when he was sent to Robben Island as a political prisoner in 1985. Years of torture followed.
The rain pelted down on the sheet metal roof of his modest home in township KwaThema, an hour’s drive east of Johannesburg, as he pulled out an impressive pile of medical documents from a cabinet: 25 years of headaches, Masemola cannot tolerate daylight, the doctors wrote.
[snip]
Dave Steward, the spokesperson for the last white president of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk, said it was an ‘unimaginably stupid decision’. Steward has angrily criticised the American trial regularly in newspaper articles.
“What in heaven’s name does a court in New York know about the complexity of South Africa in the nineteen eighties?” he wondered. “If we continue like this, any company that does business with a country that has a less than perfect human rights record will be sued. Then no one will invest in China anymore, and that is bad for the global economy.”