The Honourable Kathleen Satchwell | |
|---|---|
 Satchwell (1985) | |
| Gauteng Division of the High Court | |
| Personal details | |
| Alma mater | Rhodes University |
Kathleen Satchwell, commonly known as Kathy Satchwell, is a judge of the Gauteng Division of the High Court (formerly the South Gauteng High Court) in South Africa.
She was educated at Rhodes University in the 1960s. [1]
She was a prominent human rights attorney in the 1990s. Satchwell was also involved with court cases of the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC) and of people connected to the killing of Stompie Moeketsi, in the period 1990–1992. [2] She gave evidence before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the role of the legal system in contributing to the violations of human rights in South Africa under apartheid. [3] In 1999 she was appointed by President Nelson Mandela to be Chairperson of the Road Accident Fund Commission. [4]
In September 2001, in the case named Satchwell v President of the Republic of South Africa , Satchwell, an open lesbian, [5] won the right for her partner to enjoy the same benefits as those previously reserved for spouses of married heterosexual judges. [6] This right was confirmed by the Constitutional Court in 2002. This decision is seen as one of five key decisions that set the legal status of same-sex couples in South Africa before the legalisation of same-sex marriage.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a court-like restorative justice body assembled in South Africa in 1996 after the end of apartheid. Authorised by Nelson Mandela and chaired by Desmond Tutu, the commission invited witnesses who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations to give statements about their experiences, and selected some for public hearings. Perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and request amnesty from both civil and criminal prosecution.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, also known as Winnie Mandela, was a South African anti-apartheid activist and politician, and the second wife of Nelson Mandela. She served as a Member of Parliament from 1994 to 2003, and from 2009 until her death, and was a deputy minister of arts and culture from 1994 to 1996. A member of the African National Congress (ANC) political party, she served on the ANC's National Executive Committee and headed its Women's League. Madikizela-Mandela was known to her supporters as the "Mother of the Nation".
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Rhodes University is a public research university located in Makhanda (Grahamstown) in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. It is one of four universities in the province. Established in 1904, Rhodes University is the province's oldest university, and it is the sixth oldest South African university in continuous operation, being preceded by the University of the Free State (1904), University of Witwatersrand (1896), University of South Africa (1873) as the University of the Cape of Good Hope, Stellenbosch University (1866) and the University of Cape Town (1829). Rhodes was founded in 1904 as Rhodes University College, named after Cecil Rhodes, through a grant from the Rhodes Trust. It became a constituent college of the University of South Africa in 1918 before becoming an independent university in 1951.
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Narandran "Jody" Kollapen is a Judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He was appointed by President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa on 24 December 2021, and began his service on 1 January 2022. He had previously served as an acting justice of the Constitutional Court for a six-month period during 2017.
Satchwell v President of the Republic of South Africa and Another is a 2002 decision of the Constitutional Court of South Africa which determined that the same-sex life partner of a judge was entitled to the same financial benefits available to the opposite-sex spouse of a judge. The case, which challenged the Judges' Remuneration and Conditions of Employment Act, 1989, was brought by Kathy Satchwell, an openly lesbian judge of the Transvaal Provincial Division of the High Court.
This is a timeline of notable events in the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in South Africa.
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Chris Hani, General-Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), was assassinated by right-wing extremist Janusz Waluś on 10 April 1993. The assassination, later tied to members within the Conservative Party, occurred outside Hani's home in Dawn Park during a peak period of progressive anti-apartheid momentum in South Africa. After the assassination, racially fuelled riots drew international attention to the instability of the political division within South Africa, leading to an inclusive national democratic election in April 1994, won by the African National Congress (ANC). Waluś and his accomplice Clive Derby-Lewis were sentenced to death after their arrest in 1993; the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
Devikarani Priscilla Sewpal Jana was a South African human rights lawyer, politician and diplomat. As a member of the African National Congress (ANC) during the anti-apartheid movement, she participated in both legal activism as well as in the underground movement to end apartheid. She represented many significant figures in the movement, including South African president Nelson Mandela, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Steve Biko, Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Jana was one of the very few South Africans who had access to political prisoners, including Mandela, in the maximum security Robben Island prison, and served as an emissary for coded messages between the political prisoners and the ANC leadership.
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