Albie (Albert) Sachs was born 30 March 1935 has been an attorney, judge, anti-Apartheid activist and a member of the ANC National Executive Committee. As a young Jewish man in South Africa, working as an attorney, he defended people charged under the racist statutes and repressive security laws that we lived under during Apartheid.

When the police arrested him for his work in supporting the liberation movements, he was placed in solitary confinement. After his release, he took the opportunity to leave the country before he was re-arrested. Albie Sachs went into exile in England and then Mozambique. It was in Maputo, Mozambique in 1988, that he lost his arm and his sight in one eye when South African security agents placed a bomb in his car.

After the bombing, he devoted himself to the preparations for a new democratic constitution for South Africa. He returned to South Africa and served as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the African National Congress.

In 1994 after South Africa's first democratic elections Attorney Sachs became Justice Sachs and took his seat on the bench of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He held this position until he retired in October 2009.

In 2005 Sachs was the author of the Constitutional Court's holding in the case of the Minister of Home Affairs v. Fourie. The Court overthrew South Africa's statute defining marriage to be between one man and one woman as a violation of the Constitution's general mandate for equal protection for all and its specific mandate against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

He has also penned a number of books. In 1991, he won the Alan Paton Award for his book Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. He is also the author of Justice in South Africa, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, Sexism and the Law, The Free Diary of Albie Sachs, and, most recently, The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law in 2009.

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Page Last Updated 9 March 2010