U.S. Judge Is Held 4 Hours in South Africa

A U.S. federal appeals court judge, visiting South Africa to observe the country’s judicial system, was arrested over the weekend for visiting a black township ordered closed under the three-week-old state of emergency.

Judge Nathaniel R. Jones, 58, of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati and three South African companions were visiting a black suburb of Fort Beaufort in eastern Cape province on Saturday when they were taken into custody for not having a police permit.

They were detained for four hours, charged with violating the emergency regulations, finger-printed and ordered to appear in court today in Fort Beaufort. On Sunday, the attorney general for the eastern Cape called Jones at his hotel here to apologize and to say the charge against him, but not the others, had been withdrawn.

Conviction under the emergency regulations can be punished by 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

“I think it was an affront to the United States and to the whole notion of civility,” Jones said of the incident, adding that the South African security police knew who he was. “It was like dealing with the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.”

The South Africans who were detained with Jones were his hosts, Molly Blackburn and Di Bishop, both members of the Cape Provincial Council from the liberal white opposition Progressive Federal Party, and Brian Bishop, vice chairman of the South African Civil Rights League.

Jones, who is black, was commissioned by the Washington-based Lawyers for Civil Rights to attend the opening in Pietermaritzburg of the treason trial of 16 leaders of the United Democratic Front, a coalition of groups opposed to apartheid, and to report on the judicial process in South Africa.