11 Activists Sworn In for New S. African Court : Judiciary: Diverse makeup contrasts with all-white panels of old. Body will weigh constitutional issues.

It was a sunny morning in April, 1988, when exiled anti-apartheid lawyer Albie Sachs walked to his car in Maputo, Mozambique. As he opened the door, a bomb set by South African security forces turned his red Honda into an inferno of twisted metal.

Sachs’ right arm was ripped off by the blast. He had four broken ribs, a lacerated liver, torn nerves and ruptured eardrums, and he was shredded with shrapnel. Doctors doubted he could survive.

On Tuesday, Sachs proudly raised the stump of his arm, hidden in the folds of an elegant judicial gown, and was formally sworn in--with 10 other noted liberation lawyers and human rights activists--to preside over South Africa’s first Constitutional Court, the highest court in the land.

“It’s law and justice coming together for the first time after having conflicted so violently in this society for so many years,” Sachs said moments before the stirring ceremony.

Perhaps no other body in the post-apartheid government so symbolizes the dramatic changes that have swept this long-benighted land. The new court’s 11 justices couldn’t be more different from the system they succeeded.

Instead of the all-male, all-white judges under apartheid, the new rainbow bench includes two women and four nonwhites. Three intoned their oaths in languages no judge here has ever uttered: Zulu, Tswana and Sotho. Even the silken robes were new: royal green, instead of somber black, with frilly white bibs and red trim.

And instead of enforcing unjust laws to uphold white rule, the new court is sworn to protect and preserve a democratic constitution and generous bill of rights. The judges are empowered to overrule the legislature and the executive, a first for a nation long ruled by racist fiat.

“For too long, the law in our country has been seen and experienced as an instrument of oppression,” said Arthur Chaskalson, the court president and a widely respected human-rights lawyer.

Chaskalson’s most prominent former client sat solemnly beside him. The patrician lawyer was on the legal team that defended Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress leaders when they were convicted of treason in 1964 and sentenced to life in prison.

“The last time I appeared in court was to hear whether or not I was going to be sentenced to death,” Mandela, now the nation’s president, told the judges with a smile. “. . . Today, I speak not as an accused, but on behalf of the people of South Africa to inaugurate a court that South Africa has never had, a court on which hinges the future of our democracy.”

Under a system of checks and balances, the court of last appeal forms the third, independent leg of government after the president and Parliament. The judges will sit for seven-year, non-renewable terms.

In addition to ruling on constitutional issues, they ultimately must certify that a new constitution--due by May, 1996--adheres to sweeping principles approved during multi-party negotiations before the country’s democratic elections in April.

The court will hear its first arguments today in a dramatic opening case.

The judges will decide whether the death penalty violates the 1993 interim constitution, which guarantees the right to life. Capital punishment is hotly debated here, and the ruling is sure to be controversial. About 400 condemned prisoners await the verdict.

But on Tuesday, it was the new court’s makeup that was most arresting. In recent interviews, the judges described the frustration and danger of using a biased legal system under a despotic regime--and in some cases being jailed, tortured or forced into bitter exile.

“We had to fight against terrible odds,” recalled Justice Tholie Madala, who ran a human-rights center in the black homeland of Transkei until the center was closed by police. “You were not even sure whether you were going to . . . reach home at the end of an evening in the office.”

Other judges recalled a lifetime of indignities in segregated schools, neighborhoods and courts.

Ismail Mahomed, who was classified Indian under apartheid, was permitted to practice law after he passed the bar in 1957--but he was banned from opening an office in the whites-only building where advocates were required to work.

“For 12 years I had to squat in that building . . . depending on the favors of white colleagues to allow me to sit in their respective offices while they were in court or otherwise engaged,” he recalled. “It was a very agonizing experience.”

Mahomed was appointed the country’s first nonwhite judge in 1991 after the shift to democracy had begun. Among his new colleagues is Yvonne Mokgoro, who overcame grinding poverty and prejudice to become the first black woman judge.

“We used to have in the townships what was known as Friday evening ‘Clean the Street’ curfews, where police would drive around and clean the streets of what they called undesirables,” recalled Mokgoro, the daughter of a washerwoman and railroad laborer.

One night in 1974, she stood on a corner with her infant son bundled on her back. The police rushed her, tore her son away and threw her in the van. She still remembers her horror as the police tortured the men they had picked up.

“They were placed down, with their backs up, and the cops were shouting, ‘Go for the kidneys,’ and they trampled them on the back with their boots,” she said. “They didn’t do anything to me, but they let me sit there and watch.”

When a defiant black lawyer later secured her release, he encouraged the angry young woman to study the law herself. “That one incident made me do it,” she said.

None of the whites are traditional jurists either.

Richard Goldstone, whose legal commission chronicled the sordid misdeeds of the former government, was sworn in Tuesday, for example. But he took an immediate leave of absence to continue his even higher-profile duties elsewhere. He currently heads U.N. war crimes tribunals for both the ongoing conflict in the former Yugoslav federation and last year’s genocidal war in Rwanda.

His stand-in, Sydney Kentridge, is best known for representing the family of Steve Biko at an infamous police inquest after the charismatic Black Consciousness leader died of severe injuries while in police custody in 1977. The lawyer’s desperate but doomed attempts to indict the police for Biko’s death were portrayed by a pudgy, pugnacious Marlon Brando in the film “Cry Freedom.”

“That inquest was held at the height of apartheid, when the ethics of the government was completely authoritarian,” he said. “Today, the whole political, social and media background is different. There’s more openness, more accessibility to information and more accountability.”

Fellow jurist Laurence Ackermann helped expose the white regime’s death squads and police abuses after he resigned as a trial court judge in 1987 to battle the system as a human-rights lawyer. At the time, he recalled, most colleagues “thought I was mad.”

Judge Johann Kriegler was the crusty chairman of the independent commission that successfully oversaw the April elections. As a lawyer, he defended such diverse political clients as famed anti-apartheid author Breyten Breytenbach and white supremacist leader Eugene TerreBlanche.

Despite the obvious changes from the past, critics have called the new court too white, too male and too stacked with partisans of the ANC, which dominates the three-party coalition government. Several judges were sympathetic to those charges.

“I, for one, would certainly like to see the court achieving a better balance in the future,” said Catherine O’Regan, who at 37 is the youngest of the new justices.

But the judges were overwhelmingly optimistic that a new form of justice had dawned in South Africa. The challenge, they say, will be to instill the rule of law and a culture of human rights in a land where such basic freedoms were so long denied.

Special correspondent Sudarsan Raghavan contributed to this report.