Abstract

This chapter demonstrates the protagonism of state socialist governments and legal experts in criminalizing apartheid as a major international crime during the Cold War. It argues that African and Eastern European socialist countries were the most vocal proponents for the codification of apartheid as a crime against humanity and as a war crime in international conventions, due to their shared anti-capitalist and anti-Western imperialist agendas. Moreover, global mobilizations of legal experts with socialist orientations produced a far more radical anti-apartheid discourse than that of liberal experts in the West. It went beyond the condemnation of political repression and racial discrimination in South Africa as violations of the rule of law and connected the anti-apartheid cause to the denunciation of colonialism as a whole and the recognition of wars of national liberation as international armed conflicts.