CAPE CITY, South Africa (AP) — South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal on Friday upheld a ruling that the “free” public of the country’s former apartheid-era flag amounts to hate speech and racial discrimination and can be prosecuted.
However, the Supreme Court did not rule on whether displaying South Africa’s brutal segregation-era national flag in the privacy of a home is also considered hate speech or discriminatory.
Arguments on this express point deserve to be presented first to the lower court that first banned the flag in 2019, the Supreme Court said.
The resolution on the public display of the old flag, which was the national flag of South Africa from 1928 until its abolition when the country acceded to democracy in 1994, confirmed the ruling of the Equality Tribunal 4 years ago.
Afriforum, a lobby organization that claims to defend the interests of white Afrikaans in South Africa, challenged the flag ban in the Supreme Court, saying such a “broad ban” is a violation of the right to freedom of expression.
But in its ruling, the Supreme Court said “those who publicly wave or wave the old flag are conveying a blatant and unabashed message that they celebrate and yearn for the racism of our past. “
The fate of the orange, white and blue flag has been a heavy factor in South Africa for the country’s black majority, many of whom see it as a transparent symbol of the institutionalized racism and brutality of the apartheid regime.
The apartheid formula was officially born in 1948 and officially dismantled when Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994, when blacks were first allowed to vote. South Africa followed its current flag in those first multiracial elections.
For some South Africans, the apartheid-era flag has connotations to the swastika flag of Nazi Germany.
In defending the ban, the South African Huguy Rights Commission cited the case of Dylann Roof, the white man convicted and sentenced to death for the racist murders of nine black church members in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, as an example. of how the apartheid-era flag has maintained transparent ties to violent white supremacists.
Roof once made the impression in a photo wearing a jacket with the flag.
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