Although he may have hung up his judge’s gown, justice Dave Smuts says he will still be an active participant in Namibia’s legal system and is looking forward to advocating against injustice and inequality.
Smuts was speaking to Desert FM yesterday.
He served as a judge of appeal in the country’s top court since the start of 2015, after serving as a High Court judge since 2011.
Smuts retired as a full-time judge of the Supreme Court at the end of November, having reached permanent judges’ mandatory retirement age.
He was admitted as an attorney in Namibia in 1982, after he obtained his law degree at Stellenbosch University in South Africa in 1977.
He went on to earn a master’s degree in law at Harvard University in the United States in 1983.
The former Supreme Court judge was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019, along with former United States first lady Michelle Obama and Nigerian businessman Aliko Dangote.
Smuts also received a human rights award from Human Rights Watch in New York in 1990.
He was the first director of the Legal Assistance Centre, which was founded in 1988.
He described his formative years in the Smuts household as happy yet transformative, after his family relocated to Namibia following his father’s transfer from South Africa towards the end of his high school years.
He recalled that he witnessed the brutal repression of the apartheid regime and that this profoundly shaped his outlook.
“We had a very happy childhood and I think what had a very important impact on me in the years that followed was that I was aware of apartheid from a very young age,” he said.
According to Smuts, his parents instilled values in him which made it clear that the apartheid regime was not compatible with decent human values and equality.
It is for this reason that he rejected the racial discrimination that surrounded him growing up.
“It was explained to me that schools were segregated and the whole of society was legislated and governed in a way in which people of colour were discriminated against and had unequal treatment,” Smuts recounted.
His experience as a lawyer in Namibia during the 1980’s inspired him to write ‘Death, Detention And Disappearance’ (2019), which was inspired by his efforts to defend human rights during the turbulent decade prior to Namibia’s independence.
“From a very early age, I was very keen on doing something about that in a way.
Certainly from my high school years, I knew what I wanted to do and that was to get involved in challenging and tackling injustice and inequality in our society,” he added.
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