Greek lawyer George Bizos is well known and loved in South Africa for his fight against racism, the apartheid and his support in the values of solidarity and democracy. His contribution to the struggle for respect of human rights was recently acknowledged on two special occasions.
A few days ago, the government of South Africa named a wing after him in the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, while on Sunday George Bizos was honoured by Greece’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Terence Quick, at an event organized by the Federation of Hellenic Communities and Societies of South Africa.
Present at the event were Archbishop Damianos of Mount Sinai and Raithu, and the ambassadors of Greece and Cyprus. Mr Quick read a greeting by President of the Hellenic Republic, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, who characterized Bizos as a “fighter for freedom” and “a citizen of the world.”
George Bizos was born in Messenia in 1927. During World War II, he and his father attempted to facilitate seven New Zealander soldiers’ transition from Nazi-occupied Peloponnese to Crete. As a consequence, Bizos was forced to leave Greece and fled to Egypt in 1941. He was later sent to Durban, South Africa as a refugee.
He studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand with the support of the local Greek community. He started his law practice in Johannesburg in 1954.
Between 1963 and 1964, he was one of a team of lawyers representing Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki and Walter Sisulu in court. The three defendants received a life sentence, yet they were spared capital punishment. Bizos attributes Mandela’s avoiding the death penalty to the fact that his lawyers made it appear in court that such a verdict would give Mandela a martyr’s status.
In the 1970s, George Bizos helped set up SAHETI, a Greek school that dared be non-exclusive in the heart of apartheid.
In 1990, Bizos participated in the African National Congress (ANC) Legal and Constitutional Committee, and at Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) and was involved in drawing up the Interim Constitution, ensuring that fundamental human rights would be applied to all South African citizens without discrimination while supporting national reconciliation so that the country could move forward to peace and equal opportunities for all.
Source: thegreekobserver.com