A PRIVATE-MEMBERS bill sponsored by Imran Ismail-Moosa MP of Al Jama-ah party claims to domesticate the 1973 UN Apartheid Convention. The bill’s aim is anything but the domestication of the apartheid convention.

The UN ‘Convention on the Suppression of the Crime of Apartheid’ as it was implemented by the General Assembly, targets specific crimes ‘committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.’

For decades NGOs and activist groups like Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) have redacted the UN convention to hijack and alter its definition and intent, (targeting racial groups and policies of race segregation), to instead mean ANY GROUP, ANY PEOPLE, or ANY PERSON who may feel oppressed by another.

This misrepresentation and generalisation of legal terms is a trend in which emotive words are redeployed by activists in a way that circumvents legal scrutiny. In effect their prognostications take on the air of legality without any basis in law. To demonstrate this, it would literally take an amendment of the UN convention to make it apply to policies that do not involve race segregation and/or race discrimination.

For example, a state suppressing ‘clowns and circuses’ is not engaging in the crime of apartheid. Nevertheless, there is now a campaign before the House of Assembly to formerly adopt the UN Convention whilst rewriting its terms in order to introduce a category error in which ‘Nations are considered Races’.

Thus a Zimbabwean denied entry to South Africa could justifiable state under the new bill, it was because of his or her ‘race nationality’ and the result amounts to the crime of apartheid. A person engaged in a profession currently banned in the Republic (Prostitution) could similarly claim apartheid.

The period in which people used to claim there was an “English race” or a “German race” is long gone. Our country already has a Constitution whose Preamble ‘recognises the injustices of the past’ alongside laws targeting racism.

The bill, introduced by Islamic Party Al Jama-ah is really a thinly veiled attempt to drive both public and foreign policy, in a manner which circumvents debate on the issues at hand, and whose generalisations and obfuscations will be used to stifle speech and contravene our constitution.

Merely having an opinion on the Middle East, (and even our own country), could become evidence of supporting a new ‘crime of apartheid’ applied to literally any situation at hand. Instead of rewriting our nation’s history, and blaming Jews, we should rather be asking why it is that our courts and legislators have failed to uphold the inquiry into apartheid known as the TRC Final Report?

Instead of criminalising free speech, we should make institutional denial of apartheid in our own country a crime.