Johan Steyn: SA advocate who became a law lord in UK 1932-2017
Johan (Lord) Steyn, who has died in England at the age of 85, became one of the most influential judges in the UK and a famously outspoken champion of liberalism and human rights, after moving there from South Africa in 1972 because he found apartheid abhorrent.
This came as a surprise to his South African colleagues, who did not remember him being an outspoken champion of liberalism or opponent of apartheid while in South Africa.
Indeed, in 1963 he appeared as a junior counsel for the South African police before the Snyman commission of inquiry into the Paarl riots, which the police had put down harshly the year before after two white people were killed by rampaging members of Poqo, the armed wing of the PAC.
Justice minister John Vorster used the inquiry’s findings to justify his notorious 90-day detention without trial clause.
Steyn was a favoured son of the Cape Afrikaner establishment. It kept him supplied with lucrative briefs and he built up a successful commercial practice.
But he became increasingly gloomy about the situation in South Africa.
In 1972, after representing anti-apartheid students who were beaten up and arrested by police on the steps of St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, he left for the UK.
Institutionalised tyranny
“It was a period of institutionalised tyranny and cruelty in the richest country in Africa, inflicting great suffering on millions of black people,” he wrote later.
He noted how the government, without effective constitutional limitation on its exercise of power, “by and large could and did achieve its oppressive purposes by a scrupulous observance of legality”.
Starting from scratch and without the connections he had enjoyed in South Africa, he quickly built up a leading commercial practice in London. In six years he became a queen’s counsel. In 1985 the lord chancellor, Lord Hailsham, invited him to become a judge in the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court.
Steyn wondered if his appointment was a case of mistaken identity because the lord chancellor invariably called him “Charles”.
Seven years later he was promoted to the Court of Appeal and made a member of the Privy Council. He became a law lord in 1995. Attempts were made to block his appointment after letters appeared in the press drawing attention to his past association with the South African police. He retired from the bench in 2005.
Steyn was born into Afrikaner aristocracy in Stellenbosch on August 14 1932. His father was a founding member of the Stellenbosch University law faculty. His grandfather was a celebrated fighter in the Anglo-Boer War who was imprisoned by the British in a camp in Green Point and exiled to Sri Lanka, from where he made a daring escape back to South Africa.
After matriculating at Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck, Steyn took a degree in law at Stellenbosch and went to University College Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.
He returned to South Africa and was called to the bar in 1958.
As a senior judge in the UK, he was an uncompromising champion of human rights, including the rights of suspected terrorists. When Tony Blair’s Labour government introduced detention without trial for terror suspects, Steyn’s vociferous opposition angered the government so much that it took the unprecedented step of requesting that he be excluded from a panel of judges set up to decide on its legality.
Terrorism laws
Blair justified his new terrorism laws by saying that “the rules of the game are changing”. Steyn responded that “the maintenance of the rule of law is not a game. It is about access to justice, fundamental human rights and democratic values.”
He accused the home secretary, David Blunkett, of using “weasel words” to justify his policy on asylum seekers.
He publicly attacked his fellow South African law lord, Lord Hoffmann, for suggesting there were certain government decisions the courts should not interfere with. “In troubled times,” he said, “there is an ever-present danger of the seductive but misconceived judicial mindset that ‘after all, we are on the same side as the government’.”
Invasion of Iraq
This was a “slippery slope which tends to sap the will of judges to face up to a government guilty of abuse of power”.
He roasted the Blair government for its invasion of Iraq, and said that in its attempts to justify the invasion it was scraping “the bottom of the legal barrel”.
When subsequently there was a devastating terror attack in London, Steyn said Blair’s denial that the war in Iraq had made London and the world a more dangerous place was “a fairytale”.
He said the refusal of US courts to hold the government to account for detaining terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay, which he described as “a hellhole of utter lawlessness”, was “a monstrous failure of justice”.
It is about access to justice, fundamental human rights
Turned into a play
The public lecture in which he made these remarks in 2003 was turned into a play by journalist Victoria Brittain and author
Gillian Slovo, called Guantánamo: “Honour bound to defend freedom”.
The play begins and ends with Steyn giving extracts from his lecture. It was performed in London and moved to New York where, one night, Steyn was played by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.
Steyn’s wife Susan subsequently initiated a meeting between the two.
Steyn became the founding chairman of the international advisory board of South African civil rights group Freedom Under Law in 2009. It was felt that someone of his stature would give it an international profile and protect it against interference by the South African government.
Steyn was known for his dry wit and love of tennis, which he played at provincial level in South Africa.
He is survived by his second wife, Susan, whom he met on a tennis court and married in 1977, two sons and two daughters, one of them a QC, from his first marriage, and a stepson and stepdaughter.