Anti-apartheid activist, human rights campaigner and UN diplomat Nicholas Haysom dies at age 73

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Nicholas Haysom, a white South African anti-apartheid activist who was tapped by prisoner-turned-president Nelson Mandela to help draft the country’s new constitution that enshrined equal rights for Black people, minorities and white people, has died at 73.

Haysom went on from high-level positions promoting human rights in his home country to a distinguished career as a U.N. diplomat, serving in hot spots from Afghanistan and Iraq to Somalia and South Sudan.

His daughter, Rebecca Haysom, told The Associated Press that he died Tuesday in New York “after a long, valiant battle with heart and lung complications.”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Haysom “devoted his life to justice, dialogue, and reconciliation — from his central role in South Africa’s democratic transition serving as chief legal and constitutional adviser to president Nelson Mandela to years of leadership in U.N. posts in some of the world’s most complex and fragile settings.”

His legacy “will endure in the peace processes he advanced, the institutions he strengthened, and the principles he helped bring to life around the world,” the U.N. chief said in a statement.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, a former anti-apartheid activist, said the country mourns “a distinguished diplomat and a pioneer of our democratic administration whose commitment to justice and peace made our country, our continent and the world a better place.”

“I remember him for applying his legal acumen, mentorship, wisdom and integrity to the development of our constitution,” Ramaphosa said in a statement urging South Africans “to honor his contribution to our nation and the international community by upholding the fundamental rights and maintaining the peace he advocated so passionately and eloquently.”

He came from a family that believed in equality

Nicholas Roland Leybourne “Fink” Haysom grew up in Durban in a liberal family that believed in racial equality, especially his mother who was an activist against apartheid. At university, he said he became a critic of apartheid as well and decided to go to law school at the Universities of Natal and Cape Town to tackle the conditions of how people lived.

He went on to become president of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students and he said in a U.N. interview last year that he was arrested or detained about half a dozen times, once serving six months in solitary confinement in about 1980. Ramaphosa said he also had a creative side: He was South African Playwright of the Year in 1987.

Nobody at that time thought apartheid would end, Haysom said, and it was a “tremendous moment” when Mandela was released in 1990. At the time, Haysom was a member of a very activist human rights law firm.

The African National Congress, which Mandela led, asked Haysom to join its Constitutional Commission, and he said he spent several years with “a very exciting group of intellectuals” conceptualizing the new South Africa, and negotiating with the National Party, which instituted and enforced the apartheid system of racial segregation, on how to get there.

Having been a pariah in much of the world, Haysom said the group wanted to find the perfect formula for a constitutional state that appreciated the need for equality among all its citizens and recreated a social contract “which we wanted to be a lesson for the world.” It wasn’t easy, he said, but “the South African constitution is still regarded as perhaps one of the most progressive constitutions in the world.”

“And I think that’s what led to me being asked to be Mandela’s legal adviser … while he was president,” Haysom said, a position he held from 1994 to 1999.

Mandela wanted to set an example for the first post-apartheid government to respect the law, Haysom said, “and he was really at the forefront of creating a society built on respect for legal equality and human rights.”

He saw Mandela every morning and said he was “tremendously gracious.”

“But he was steely, strong in the conviction he had that he was embarking on the right path, and he persevered,” Haysom said. “As I say to my children, the lesson of Mandela is not just being a nice person, it’s perseverance in your ideals that’ll change the world.”

He worked across the decades to end ethnic discord

Under Mandela, Haysom joined a team that helped end ethnic violence in Burundi between Hutus and Tutsis in the 1990s. He then was asked to try to find a formula to restore peace in Sudan between the north and south, which eventually led to South Sudan seceding and becoming an independent country in 2011.

Haysom then spent from 2005 to 2007 in Iraq trying to find a formula for its communities — Shia, Sunni and Kurd — to live together, an issue he saw in all conflicts. From 2007 to 2012, he served in then-U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s office as director for political, peacekeeping and humanitarian affairs. He then spent four years in Afghanistan from 2012 to 2016 in two U.N. roles.

Most of the rest of his U.N. career was focused on Sudan and South Sudan, where he had been head of the peacekeeping mission since 2021 except for a brief stint in Somalia. He was ordered to leave by the Somali government in 2019 after questioning the arrest of a former leader of the al-Shabab extremist group.

Haysom is survived by his wife Delphine and their two sons Charles and Hector, as well as his three older children, Rebecca, Simone, and Julian, from his previous marriage to Mary Ann Cullinan.

Haysom said there was a time when he was “quite probably inappropriately proud” of his efforts particularly in Burundi, Sudan and South Africa, but after a few years all those peace agreements were in trouble.

It’s a recognition, he said, that peace doesn’t last forever and democracy requires “constant engagement by people of good intention.”

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Gerald Imray contributed to this report from Cape Town, South Africa