New York: If victims of apartheid had a case against companies dealing with the apartheid state, then electrical companies could be sued for their part in deaths on the electric chair, a judge argued this week.

Judge John Sprizzo was considering three lawsuits brought by 91 apartheid victims and Khulumani, a human rights group, against several major corporations that did business in apartheid South Africa, including ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, Royal Dutch Petroleum, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, Ford and DaimlerChrysler.

The suits seek to follow the precedent of litigation won by Holocaust victims against corporations that collaborated with the Nazis.

The hearing this week promised to centre on arcane points of law in courtroom 705 in the United States district court in lower Manhattan. Instead, constant interruptions by the sceptical judge provided some entertainment – if not always for the supporters of apartheid reparations packing the court.

By Thursday night he seemed on the verge of dismissing the three lawsuits. He harshly told the plaintiffs’ lawyers that they had failed to make a convincing case that the companies had “aided and abetted” crimes of the apartheid regime.

Sprizzo said he would make a written judgment at a later date. But several of his comments in court indicated he would grant the companies’ motion to dismiss the suits.

He compared what the corporations did to “someone selling sugar to a bootlegger.”

“Their motivation was to make a buck,” he said. “That’s a different motivation than the apartheid government’s.

“Being at the scene of a crime is not sufficient,” Sprizzo said. “Enjoying the benefits of crime is not enough to prove participation. There’s no indication that the defendants helped shape the policies of the South African government.”

He challenged the plaintiff’s attorneys to show complicity in apartheid’s crimes. “Were they acting as agents of the South African government? Were they paid? Were they employees?”

The judge challenged the plaintiffs’ lawyers to show that there was a body of international law that prohibited doing business with repressive regimes.

“We [the United States] do business with China. We do business with Russia,” he said. “We do business with all kinds of countries around the world that you could say arguably violate human rights in ways that are much more egregious than apartheid.”

When Michael Osborne, the plaintiff’s lawyer, sought precedent in a ruling by the United Nations war crimes court in Yugoslavia, Sprizzo countered: “Separate housing is not the same thing as burying people in mass graves.

“There is racial segregation and then there is racial segregation,” he said.

He rejected arguments that the numerous United Nations resolutions condemning apartheid created the international law upon which the cases could be tried.

“When did the UN general assembly prohibit apartheid?” the judge asked, pointing out that general assembly resolutions are not legally binding on nations.

Sprizzo questioned the entire concept of international law. “Can there be any law without the power to enforce it?” he asked.

“What is international law but that the big powers get together and agree on something because it is in their interests?”

He challenged the plaintiffs to prove there were international conventions or treaties that made “aiding and abetting” a crime. That charge is a principal one in the lawsuits.

Joe Lauria, Independent Online, January 28, 2004