Features of Human Rights: Apartheid (Frederika)

In South Africa, when the all National Party came into power they implemented a combination of policies on segregation both new and old which were collectively known as the movement called Apartheid. Since the people in power were historically white, this forced the nonwhite population of South Africa to live at a disadvantage. Some of the most notable act were the race registration act, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Amendment Act which prohibited sexual relations between whites and nonwhites, and the creation of neighborhoods called Bantustans which forced blacks onto land with limited funding and resources. 

The distribution of rights based on their officially registered race directly violates the universal characteristic of human rights and Article 2 of the UDHR since one racial group was favored over others. If South Africans had universal rights, there wouldn’t be a need to categorize everyone so that they could give the elite minority exclusive privileges, instead, all citizens would have been recognized as people with equal treatment. This is also clearly not inalienable since the only people registered as white had all the rights while the other races had to live with a limited set of rights and unequal opportunities given to them by the whites in power. 

The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages is a clear violation of Article 16 which states that everyone has the right to marry without the limitations race. It also demonstrates an attempt to make laws divisible since there could be unequal privileges within a family that was mixed. If the child was mixed while the parents were black and white, there would be limits to what they could do or where they could go together. The Apartheid laws were definitely interdependent since a person’s race affected how they lived their lives especially regarding residence, marriage and family life. The National Party went to great lengths by reforming the country’s system and even violating human rights just to ensure that they would by enforcing segregation. 

Sources: 

https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/history-apartheid-south-africa 

https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html 

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