South Africa’s Supreme Court docket of Attraction has upheld a ruling that the “gratuitous” public show of the nation’s {old} apartheid-era flag quantities to hate speech and racial discrimination and will be prosecuted
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — South Africa’s Supreme Court docket of Attraction on Friday upheld a ruling that the “gratuitous” public show of the nation’s {old} apartheid-era flag quantities to hate speech and racial discrimination and will be prosecuted.
The Supreme Court docket did not, nevertheless, give a ruling on whether or not displaying the nationwide flag from South Africa’s period of brutal racial segregation within the privateness of a house also needs to be thought-about hate speech or discriminatory.
Arguments over that particular matter ought to first be offered to the decrease court docket that originally banned the flag in 2019, the Supreme Court docket mentioned.
The choice on the general public displaying of the {old} flag, which was South Africa’s nationwide flag from 1928 till it was abolished when the nation achieved democracy in 1994, upheld that ruling given by the Equality Court docket 4 years in the past.
Afriforum, a foyer group that claims it represents the pursuits of South Africa’s white Afrikaans folks, challenged the banning of the flag within the Supreme Court docket, saying such a “wide-reaching ban” was an infringement of the proper to freedom of expression.
However in its ruling, the Supreme Court docket mentioned that “those that publicly maintain up or wave the {old} flag convey a brazen, damaging message that they have fun and lengthy for the racism of our previous.”
The destiny of the orange, white and blue flag has been a extremely charged challenge in South Africa, notably for the nation’s Black majority, lots of whom view it as an overt image of the institutionalized racism and brutality of the apartheid regime.
The apartheid system formally got here into being in 1948 and was formally dismantled when Nelson Mandela grew to become South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994, when Blacks have been allowed to vote for the primary time.
For some South Africans, the apartheid-era flag has related connotations to the swastika flag of Nazi Germany.
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