Justice Takes Its Course

South Africa's Nationalist government long ago decided that liberty is for white men only. Last week it tightened the definition by serving notice that personal liberty applies only to those white South Africans whom its ministers happen to like.

One of the whites whom Nationalist Minister of Justice Charles Swart happens to dislike is voluble little Emil Solomon ("Solly") Sachs, 50, former secretary of Johannesburg's militantly anti-Communist Garment Workers' Union. Solly's principal crime in the minister's eyes is that his union has a mixed membership of

Boer women, Negroes and half-caste girls. Last spring the minister used his powers under the Nationalists' all-embracing Suppression of Communism Act to boot Solly out of his job in the Garment Workers' Union. Last week he hauled Sachs before a Johannesburg magistrate's court on charges of attending a meeting of his own trade union which, in the minister's opinion, "might have furthered the ends of Communism."

The trial was a farce. Swart offered no evidence, largely because he had none: Sachs was expelled from the Communist Party in 1931 because he wasn't sufficiently "revolutionary," and only recently in South Africa's supreme court he won $9,000 damages from a Nationalist newspaper which alleged that he was a "concealed Communist." Said the influential Johannesburg Star: "Sachs must be the only person in the country to have a supreme-court ruling that he isn't a Communist."

But Johannesburg Magistrate Edward George Halse knew better than to thwart Swart. Sachs was guilty, he ruled, because under the Suppression of Communism Act, a man is legally a Communist if the Minister of Justice merely says he is. Halse admitted that the minister's power is "wide and drastic, and must make serious inroads on liberty." Notwithstanding, he sentenced Solly Sachs to six months in jail.

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