SOUTH AFRICA: Packing the Courts

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South Africa's Nationalist Prime Minister Johannes Gerhardus Strydom last week tore down the last big constitutional barrier to one-party racial control over his divided land. He had already packed South Africa's High Court bench, by adding five new judges favorable to the government; now he pressed through Parliament a bill endorsing his court-packing decree, and ensuring that a quorum of the new court would be able to override the South African constitution.

Strydom's chief objective, like his predecessor Daniel Malan's, was to disenfranchise the 45,000 mixed-blood people who still have votes in South Africa. One of the "entrenched clauses," written into the South African constitution by the British Parliament in 1909, guarantees the voting rights of all mixed-blood people in Cape Province. Twice the Nationalists have passed legislation that, in effect, would enable the government to root out this "entrenched clause," but twice the High Court has ruled their efforts unconstitutional. To override the court, the constitution requires a two-thirds majority of both Houses of Parliament. But the Nationalists, for all their gerrymandering of districts, have never been able to win so large a majority in the country. Strydom's solution: pack the court with judges favorable to the government's policy.

Black Monday. Strydom's bill increased the High Court membership from six to eleven. He explained it as an attempt "to bring a larger number of legal minds to bear on constitutional problems." Of the five new judges appointed, one has campaigned for the Nationalists in Cape Province and the rest are undistinguished, except in their loyalty to the Strydom regime. In Johannesburg, the Society of Advocates (a bar association) raised its voice in protest: "It is dangerous and unpatriotic to imperil, for the sake of mere political advantage, the great esteem in which our highest court is held." Editorialized the Rand Daily Mail: "History may yet record Monday, April 25, 1955, as one of the most tragic days in the Union's affairs."

In Parliament, the dispirited remnants of the late Jan Christiaan Smuts's United Party fought to the end. "The government is aiming at a puppet court which would ultimately be no better than a row of ventriloquists' dummies," shouted one M.P. before he was gaveled down. Many in the opposition were distressed more by what Strydom was doing to the courts than by what he was doing to the blacks. But Strydom had the votes: in the Lower House the bill passed its vital second reading, 88 to 56.

Packing Parliament. Once the new court assembles (probably Oct. 1), Strydom expects it to endorse his apartheid (segregation) policies. Another likely possibility is that he will ask judicial sanction to strike out the present guarantee of equality to the English and Afrikaans languages in the schools and in the government. Should the court balk, Strydom is prepared to pack it a second time. And if he still has difficulties, his Nationalists are confident that they can pack Parliament as well, by appointing new members to the Senate. Eventually Strydom intends to make his country a Boer republic, seceding from the British Commonwealth. He has promised not to secede in the next three years.