High-level intersessional discussion

Celebrating the centenary of Nelson Mandela

Opening Remarks by Ms. Kate Gilmore, United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights

Geneva, 27 April 2018

Distinguished President
Distinguished delegates, of the Human Rights Council
Excellencies,
Ladies and gentlemen,

We honor here today the gift to the world that was the life of Nelson Mandela and of all that he represents. To celebrate his unique part in the larger effort to liberate the people of South Africa from the scourge of a political, economic and social system rooted in race-based differentiation such that degradation of a majority of people and unjust elevation the rest was embedded even through law, defended even by the judiciary, justified even by leadership from highest office both within and beyond the country.

We celebrate April 27 as Freedom Day in recollection that, 23 years ago, through exercise of their right to public participation, 19.7 million South Africans, for the first time, freely participated in the first non-racial democratic elections: three hundred years of colonialism, segregation and white minority rule were a struck a death blow as ballot paper after ballot paper slipped into place a new democratic government, led by Nelson Mandela.

That transformation by formal title into “president” marked a major milestone in his long march to freedom – a journey from petitioner to persecuted to prisoner to president. But it was not Nelson Mandela who was transformed in that journey, as much as it was he - in his steadfastness alongside the steadfastness of his comrades and their supporters – who transformed the world around them.

The acid rain of discrimination, violence, disrespect, of unfair trail, arbitrary detention, torture, of decades long intimidation of family and friend fell hard and heavy on the rock of this man and still he did not bow, disintegrate or break and still he would not hate.

Excellencies, here today, in this chamber, while recalling him rightly as head of state and critically, as the first democratically elected president of a liberated South Africa, our human rights purposes oblige us to do more than recall him only in his position of power.

For, the other roles he played for far, far longer were of a kind that today so many, with formal power, would seek to crush.

For he was first a jurist. A man of law, who loved justice. In his struggle for freedom, he went first to the courts. He understood well the importance of law as a tool for just adjudication of rights; and he courageously sought to use law to defend universal rights against national attack.

He then was made, by force of circumstance and conscience, both a resistor and a human rights defender. When the institutions of the state failed to uphold his rightful pleas for equality in the face of discrimination; for equal access to essential services in the face of their deliberate denial; when the courts refused to recognize his claims against race-based identity cards and race-based bars on freedom of movement, he and his comrades took up the tools of civic space and civil society to speak out, to organize protest, to mount resistance, to amplify demand and to expose, denounce and subvert what would be revealed to be the moral corruption of the apartheid regime - with its callous and violent violations of the state’s universal obligations.

Then that state made of him a political prisoner - through unfair trial, under illegitimate law and improper court room procedure, detaining him under weight of disproportionate sentence, originally under threat of the death penalty, commuted then to what would amount to 27 years of deprivation of that liberty which was his right – as it was the right of all others likewise imprisoned by that same callous hatred.

Despite the walls, and the barb wire, the isolation of his prison island and constraints of his cell, Mandela became also philosopher and teacher. Though his body literally was enchained, none could imprison his mind nor limit his heart or silence his longing. The more his silence was sought, the sharper his light shone - so that in time, even his prison guards became his supporters - present even at his inauguration.

Mandela emerged from decades of detention not bowed down or twisted with resentment or by lust for revenge but with a bountiful, mysterious energy derived from a vision for a future South Africa that he had imagined so well, so long and so fully while jailed, that it was if he almost willed that vision into being. For, in the face of despair, he built hope. In the face of hate, he did not stray from his determined inclusive regard for others. In the face of cruelty, he did not long for revenge. In the face of armed opposition against him, he sought instead negotiation and of course in, then President de Klerk, he eventually found the fist lowered into an arm outstretched.

Of all the lessons in which his example can be said to instruct us, surely these must stand out - the love of justice; the critical part that civil society must play when the state betrays; the cruelty of liberty deprived without the rule of law and the triumph that disciplined, robust - not puny - hope provides over cheap, mean, brutal hate.

How many Mandelas have lost their lives in civil society struggle as human rights defenders under attack? How many Mandelas languish as dissenters in our jails, without their right of appeal met? How many Mandelas have seen the inside of the torture chamber, of the isolation cell, suffered the casual cancellation of the family visit?

Nelson Mandela’s life reminds us also of the high cost paid by our societies and their prospects for peace, inclusion and justice, when we seek to silence the dissenting voice; when we deploy law and its courts, for illegal purpose; when we arbitrarily detain the dissident; when for political reasons we deprive opposition voices of their rightful expression.

He was so much more than a president. The roles he played throughout his life - jurist, human rights defender, dissenter, prisoner, teacher, then president forged in him a character and temperament that made of him perhaps the most gifted leader of his time, if not of his century.

He famously believed education to be the most powerful weapon by which to change the world for the better. In the class room of human history, we have failed many tests. Tough exams lie ahead. And time is our unrelenting task master. When we see, however, one who has so well excelled, overcoming far greater obstacles than we can imagine, then we have offered the gift of an inspired “cheat” sheet for justice. We don’t have to look any further in order to study more effectively to learn more clearly how to lead for so much better. By the way, he danced very well too.