Geneva | Monday
CAMPAIGNING New York lawyer Ed Fagan is to sue banks in Europe and the United States on behalf of victims of South Africa’s apartheid regime, it was reported on Sunday.
Fagan told the Swiss newspaper Dimanche.ch that banks in France, Switzerland, Britain and the United States had profited from supporting the regime while it had a clear record of “torture, mass executions, abductions and neo-slavery”.
The apartheid regime, based on racial segregation of South Africa’s ethnic communities, was established in the mid 1960s and first started to crumble in the early 1990s.
Referring to a resolution by the UN Security Council in 1985, which imposed trade sanctions on the regime, Fagan said: “When the banks ignored the boycott, they broke the law. They must pay for that.”
Fagan, who is known for his previous advocacy on behalf of Holocaust victims, said he would bring the matter before the US judicial system because the Swiss courts had a record of awarding low damages.
He said his clients would fall into three categories: non-governmental organisations; associations representing victims and also individually named victims, who run into hundreds of thousands.
Ulrich Pfister, representative for the Swiss bank UBS, said on Sunday that such action had been rumoured for years and the bank was taking the news calmly. – AFP
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