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Survivors and relatives of people killed when apartheid police opened fire on demonstrators in 1960 have launched legal action against the South African government, their lawyers said on Thursday.
The Sharpeville Massacre became a defining moment in the struggle against South Africa’s white-minority apartheid regime, drawing international attention to the government’s racial oppression and violence.
Lawyers for Human Rights said they would challenge legislation passed a year after the massacre that barred survivors and dependants of those killed from pursuing legal claims.
“The plaintiffs will argue that the Indemnity Act should be struck from the statute book,” they said in a statement.
The law had effectively extinguished all legal claims arising from the massacre and infringed the plaintiffs’ constitutional right to access courts, it said.
Official apartheid-era police records state that 69 people were killed and at least 180 wounded in the massacre. However, subsequent research cited by the lawyers found that at least 91 people were killed and more than 238 were wounded.
Many of those shot were hit in the back as they attempted to flee the scene.
The apartheid system officially ended with South Africa’s first all-race elections in 1994.
