Foreign Firms in S. Africa to Get New Code

Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, head of a blue-ribbon United Nations panel that conducted hearings this week on the role of foreign corporations in South Africa, said Friday that the group will propose tougher standards for firms operating there.

“We’ve put together some tests,” Fraser said at a news conference. “They go far, far beyond the Sullivan code.”

The Sullivan code was drafted by Philadelphia clergyman Leon Sullivan in 1977 and calls on U.S. corporations operating in South Africa to voluntarily guarantee equal pay and advancement for black employees, among other things. About half of the estimated 300 U.S. firms operating in South Africa have agreed to uphold the Sullivan code.

Fraser declined to give details of the proposed tests, saying this must await a final report from the panel, expected within a month. But Fraser did say the panel will seek to strengthen oil and arms embargoes already in place against South Africa.

Fraser’s panel hopes that a tougher code, coming from a wider range of nations and with the weight of the United Nations behind it, could be more effective in bringing about peaceful reform in South Africa’s apartheid system of discrimination against blacks.

The 11-member group, called the Panel of Eminent Persons, was formed last year and includes one American--former Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-Tex.)--as well as representatives from the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Argentina and Great Britain.

The conservative Australian leader said the panel unanimously agreed after the weeklong hearing that voluntary measures are insufficient.

“I don’t accept the argument from Afrikanerdom that if you leave them alone they will change,” Fraser said. “If you leave them alone they will never change.”

He called the Reagan Administration’s policy of constructive engagement--by which a continuing U.S. presence in South Africa could theoretically accomplish change through persuasion--”dead and buried, even if the President won’t admit it.”

Fraser said he drew his conclusion on this from a visit to South Africa earlier this month during which he said he saw teen-age girls whipped by police.

“It’s a police state and the police are out of control,” he said.

Although 1,000 international corporations were invited to testify at the hearings, none appeared.