This issue of Crime and Social Justice addresses both the international and domestic dimensions of the legal and political challenge to apartheid, emphasizing the violations of internationally adopted human rights accords. In "Apartheid in South Africa and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Lennox Hinds measures the South African government's policy of apartheid against the Charter of the United Nations and the General Assembly's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has become binding as a new rule of customary international law since it was adopted in 1948. Notwithstanding an abundance of evolving international law flowing from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the 1973 Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, the United States government flouts binding resolutions and treaties with respect to the outlawed minority settler state of South Africa, and colludes in efforts to rehabilitate apartheid. The article analyzes the web of laws maintaining apartheid and therefore repressing legitimate political dissent, from the dragnet Suppression of Communism Act and the new Internal Security Act to the Bantustan policy, the historical suppression of trade unions, police violence and the use of capital punishment, and the 1983 Constitution Act, which attempted unsuccessfully to undergird apartheid while expanding the powers of the executive presidency and promoting a democratic, parliamentary facade.

"Academic Freedom, Censorship, and Repression in South Africa" is written by a South African activist, Jeremy Cronin, who spent years in prison for engaging in clandestine activities for the African National Congress (ANC). This article begins with Cronin's reflections on Pretoria's Maximum Security Prison, with its sounds of government executions and the songs of resistance, and links the issue of genuine academic freedom to the long tradition of struggle among the majority of South Africa's people, not the least of which was the Soweto uprising against the enforced use of Afrikaans. The lecture traces the culture of colonialism, the twisted route of Greco-Roman civilization through Europe and its immaculate conception in South Africa as it is reflected in white written landscape poetry, stripped of mention of the terrain's original inhabitants, then through the triumphalist phase with its celebration of nationalism, one white race, and expansionism predicated on the mining revolution. Finally, it reflects a profound sense of unease, which is in essence a recognition that what had been built rested on a lie, that the indigenous population had not and would not acquiesce in its own oppression. According to Cronin, genuine academic freedom presupposes free and equal education, the abolition of apartheid in education (such as the Extension of University Education Act), as well as the assurance of the right to housing, security, nonintervention and peace, and the transfer of social wealth to the majority.

"The Freedom Charter: The People's Charter in the 1980s," written by another South African scholar/activist, Raymond Suttner, documents the origins and process involved in drafting the Freedom Charter. It is a history of the difficult route traveled by democratic, anti-apartheid forces in South Africa in drawing up points of unity agreed upon by people of all colors. Suttner notes that after the suppression of black organizations in the 1960s, white South African progressives were thrust into the position of becoming the temporary custodians of the anti-apartheid struggle. They initially tended to seek inspiration for a new society from outside sources like the U.S. Bill of Rights or the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, not realizing that there already existed a significant South African human rights document, the Freedom Charter. The campaign for the Charter itself, formulated at the Congress of People in 1955, was met by police harassment and the document was subsequently suppressed. The Charter anticipated developments in international law by characterizing apartheid as a crime, for it represents a system of institutionalized, permanent violence against South Africa's black population.

Also included in this issue is Suttner's article "Political Trials and the Legal Process in South Africa." Unfortunately, imposition of the Declaration of Emergency made it impossible for the author to update this article. The author will address key changes in a future article. Suttner has also served many years in prison for engaging in clandestine work for the African National Congress, and is intimately familiar with political trials. Here he analyzes the emergence of political trials after the 1960s and a modification in this "drastic legal process" in the 1980s with the restructuring of the state. The salient feature of political trials is that they are aimed not at individuals but at the organizations they represent. Moreover, while even "ordinary" trials are stacked against black and poor defendants, political defendants suffer under even further disadvantages in substantive and procedural law. The process of criminalizing dissent and the widespread use of government security legislation have completely eroded any sense of impartiality in the South African judiciary.

The criminalization of youth is addressed in Herman Schwendinger's thoughtful review of a book from South Africa about youth gangs in Capetown, where policies of apartheid have totally disorganized black family life. Darnell Hawkins's article on "Trends in Black-White Imprisonment" provides comparative support for the argument that the Reagan administration's defense of institutionalized violence against black South Africans is reflected in racist patterns of imprisonment in the United States.

"In Defense of Civil Disobedience," by Francis Boyle, takes us into the criminal courts in the United States, where successful acquittals in The People v. Jarka were obtained for defendants who had engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience activities directed against the Reagan administration's nuclear weapons policies and intervention in Central America. The acquittals are significant from a legal point of view because they rested on a defense that invoked the traditional common law principle of "necessity." In Jarka, the accused were exonerated because it was reasonably believed that their conduct was necessary to avoid a public or private injury greater than the injury that might have resulted from their own conduct. This precedent was subsequently adopted by defense attorneys for individuals protesting South Africa's policy of apartheid in the Chicago v. Streeter case, where the defendants were also acquitted of all charges. Professor Boyle, who served as a counsel for the defense and expert witness on international law in the Jarka case, stresses the potential usefulness of this defense for other progressive defense lawyers and activists.

In a special feature of this issue, "Voices of Resistance," we are pleased to provide contributions by some of the most distinguished writers in the United States. Adrienne Rich introduces and selects poems from South African poets, members of the ANC, both men and women, inside and outside prison walls; Piri Thomas comments on South Africa and the prison poetry now being published in the United States; and Luis Talamantez completes this section with recent poetry that builds upon his writings published in Life Within a Heart Imprisoned at an earlier time, when he was one of the "San Quentin Six" (see Crime and Social Justice 10, 1978).

In an interview with Noam Chomsky, violence in U.S. global policy comes under close scrutiny. The U.S. role in obstructing the peacekeeping function of the United Nations and the Right's pressure to discipline that world body are discussed. Chomsky argues that the Reagan administration's commitment to violence and terror is a bit beyond the historical norm, but that it is fully consistent with interventionist policies historically, whether in Southeast Asia or in its most intensified form in the Western Hemisphere. The norm is the Rule of Force, which gives way to the Rule of Law only when pacifying the domestic population, denouncing official enemies, or as a last resort, dealing with problems where other means prove ineffective.

In "Legal Aid, Reform, and the Welfare State," which performs a post mortem on the failure of the legal aid programs born under conditions of the expanding welfare state, Laureen Snider examines the gap between the reality and rhetoric of legal aid for the poor in Canada and the United States. At the same time, the author uses this case study to explore the contradictions of reform strategies in capitalist society.

In an article by Hungarian scholar József Vigh entitled "Thoughts on the Essence of Socialist Criminology," we continue to expand on the vital debates introduced in our last issue (No. 23). Dr. Vigh analyzes the development of Marxist theories on the causes of crime and measures for its prevention. Tracing advances over earlier socialist thinking -- which predicted the disappearance of crime as a consequence of reducing social inequality and explained its reproduction under socialism as ideological remnants of the old, capitalist, society -- he author recognizes that crime is not alien to socialism. Nonetheless, on the basis of statistical data, Vigh argues that the general long-term tendency in the socialist states will be for crime to continue to decline and stabilize, well beneath the levels in capitalist countries. The author outlines the conditions under which crime rates will rise in the short run, and what can reasonably be expected of socialist society with respect to the control of crime. The centrality of prevention in socialist policy is underscored, as is decriminalization and individualization of treatment.

This issue concludes with Virginia Engquist Grabiner's thoughtful review of an important new book on rape by Julia and Herman Schwendinger, long-time contributors to Crime and Social Justice.