The path-breaking odyssey of George Bizos SC: A tribute

Abstract

George Bizos SC died on 9 September 2020 at the age of 92, as the most senior member of the Johannesburg Bar. Bizos joined the Bar in 1954 and took silk in 1978. Therefore his career at the Bar spanned an extraordinary 65 years during a tumultuous period of South Africa’s history. From 1991 until shortly before his death, he served as Senior Counsel at the Legal Resources Centre’s Constitutional Litigation Unit. He will be remembered as one of South Africa’s greatest advocates, particularly with regard to the innumerable political trials he appeared in, many of which have been discussed and debated in the pages of the South African Journal on Human Rights. Throughout his years as a struggle lawyer during apartheid, and long after democratic elections in 1994, Bizos was a major contributor to the constitutional transition and the building of South Africa’s constitutional democracy. When, in 1999, the University of the Witwatersrand conferred an honorary doctorate of law honoris causa on Bizos, the citation described him as ‘the doyen’ of the human rights lawyers at the Johannesburg Bar. Such was the breadth and depth of his work over more than half a century that I can only touch on some of his most lasting contributions, and their significance, both for public interest lawyers and for future human rights debates. It is difficult to describe the role of George Bizos as counsel without putting the apartheid legal system as a whole on trial. All of the political trials in which he represented activists and freedom fighters involved direct confrontation with the apartheid state, mediated through the artifice of legalism that it used to suppress political activity. He never shied away from speaking truth to power. While Bizos is particularly remembered for his role in arguably the most famous political trials of the twentieth century, including the Rivonia Trial and Delmas Trial, he represented many more political activists and freedom fighters, including many less well-known figures. It was during this brutal period that Bizos developed a deep, lifelong and unflinching abhorrence for the death penalty, scarred as he was by the execution of activists that he had represented. During the Rivonia Trial, he reportedly persuaded Nelson Mandela to