South African court upholds ban on apartheid-era flag

South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal on Friday upheld a ruling that the “gratuitous” public display of the former apartheid-era flag amounts to hate speech and racial discrimination and can be processed

The Supreme Court, however, did not rule on whether displaying South Africa’s brutal apartheid-era national flag in the privacy of a home should also be considered hate or discriminatory speech.

Arguments on that specific matter should first go to the lower court that initially banned the flag in 2019, the Supreme Court said.

SOUTH AFRICA BANS DELIBERATE DISPLAY OF APARTHEID-ERA FLAG AFTER COURT RULES HATE SPEECH

The decision on the public display of the old flag, which was South Africa’s national flag from 1928 until it was abolished when the country achieved democracy in 1994, upheld the ruling by the Court of Equality four years ago.

Afriforum, a lobby group that says it represents the interests of white Africans in South Africa, challenged the ban on the flag in the Supreme Court, saying the “wide-ranging ban” was a violation of the right to freedom of expression. expression

But in its ruling, the Supreme Court said that “those who publicly raise or wave the old flag convey an unabashed and destructive message that they celebrate and yearn for the racism of our past.”

The fate of the orange, white and blue flag has been a highly charged issue in South Africa, particularly for the country’s black majority, many of whom see it as an obvious symbol of institutionalized racism and the brutality of the apartheid regime .

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The apartheid system was officially born in 1948 and was formally dismantled when Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994, when blacks were allowed to vote for the first time. South Africa adopted its current flag at the time of those first all-race elections.

For some South Africans, the apartheid-era flag has similar connotations to the swastika flag of Nazi Germany.

Arguing in support of the ban, the South African Human Rights Commission referred to the case of Dylann Roof, the white man convicted and sentenced to death for the 2015 racist murders of nine black church members in Charleston, South Carolina, as an example of how the apartheid-era flag maintained clear connections to violent white supremacists.

Roof once appeared in a photograph wearing a flag jacket.

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