Richard Goldstone

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Richard Goldstone bigraphy, stories - South African former judge

Richard Goldstone : biography

26 October 1938 –

Richard Joseph Goldstone (born 26 October 1938) is a South African former judge. After working for 17 years as a commercial lawyer, he was appointed by the South African government to serve on the Transvaal Supreme Court from 1980 to 1989 and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of South Africa from 1990 to 1994. He was one of several liberal judges who issued key rulings that undermined apartheid from within the system by tempering the worst effects of the country’s racial laws. Among other important rulings, Goldstone made the Group Areas Act – under which non-whites were banned from living in "whites only" areas – virtually unworkable by restricting evictions. As a result, prosecutions under the act virtually ceased.

During the transition from apartheid to multiracial democracy in the early 1990s, he headed the influential Goldstone Commission investigations into political violence in South Africa between 1991 and 1994. Goldstone’s work enabled multi-party negotiations to remain on course despite repeated outbreaks of violence, and his willingness to criticise all sides led to him being dubbed "perhaps the most trusted man, certainly the most trusted member of the white establishment" in South Africa. He was credited with playing an indispensable rôle in the transition and became a well known public figure in South Africa, attracting widespread international support and interest.

Goldstone’s work investigating violence led directly to him being nominated to serve as the first chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda from August 1994 to September 1996. He prosecuted a number of key war crimes suspects, notably the Bosnian Serb political and military leaders, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. On his return to South Africa he took up a seat on the newly-established Constitutional Court of South Africa, to which he had been nominated by President Nelson Mandela. In 2009, Goldstone led a fact-finding mission created by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate international human rights and humanitarian law violations related to the Gaza War. The mission concluded that Israel and Hamas had both potentially committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, findings which sparked outrage in Israel and the initiation of a personal campaign against Goldstone. In 2011, in the light of investigations by the Israeli forces which indicated that they had not intentionally targeted civilians as a matter of policy, Goldstone wrote that if evidence which had been available later had been available at the time (a reason why it had not been available at the time being "Israel’s lack of cooperation with our investigation"), the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

Awards and honours

Goldstone has received the 1994 International Human Rights Award of the American Bar Association, the 2005 Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights, and the 2009 MacArthur Award for International Justice, announced by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

He holds honorary degrees from Hebrew University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Maryland, and the Universities of Cape Town, British Columbia, Glasgow, and Calgary among others. He was the first person to be granted the title, "The Hague Peace Philosopher" in 2009, as part of the new Spinoza Fellowship of The Hague, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), Radio Netherlands, and The Hague Campus of Leiden University. He is an honorary fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, an honorary member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Goldstone was a fellow of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University in 1989.

Academic and charity activities

In March 1996, Goldstone was named chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He served for two terms, stepping down in September 2006. He was a Global Visiting Professor of Law at New York University School of Law in spring 2004, and in the fall, he was the William Hughes Mulligan Visiting Professor at Fordham University School of Law. In spring 2005, he was the Henry Shattuck Visiting Professor Law at Harvard Law School. Goldstone participated as guest faculty in the Oxford-George Washington International Human Rights Program in 2005.