Gilbert White

The definition of torture, the identification of malpractice, and the suggestion of means, both individual and social, to cope with it is a complex process. In some sense, however, it is much easier to handle than other aspects of human rights violations.

We turn now to concepts of human rights, civil and political rights, and how these are related to social and political and economic rights and needs. To do this, we intend to begin by exposing the situation in one country—South Africa—which has been very much in our minds in recent years, as an arena in which there has been systematic discrimination against the great proportion of the population.

Having heard from someone who has lived through this experience of apartheid and has, himself, been a vigorous worker to bring about its modification, we will then hear from two active participants in the advancement of human rights at home and overseas.

Professor Ismail Mohamed is a member of one of those three groups in South Africa that account for 80 percent of the population, “colored,” “black,” and “Asian.” He was born in the community of the East Cape. He was, I believe, the first person from the colored ranks to attain the status of a lectureship in the University of Witwatersrand and probably the first mathematician in any university in South Africa. He has maintained that status since, in a country in which hardly 10 percent of the faculty comes from all three of those majority groups discriminated against. He gives us an opportunity to sense a little of the complexity of coping with human rights violations when one is a victim of gross discrimination.

Next, we will hear, as a discussant, from Robert Kates, a geographer who has worked in overseas situations such as Tanzania on problems of how low-income people wrest, in the face of natural hazards, a harmonious relationship with the resources of the area. He was, as you have heard, first chairman of the Committee on Human Rights.

Then we will hear from Walter Rosenblith, a physicist and communications engineer who became interested in the brain as a communications system and who has studied its electrical activity through the use of computers and has been interested in communications on a much broader scale. Most recently, as vice president of the International Council of Scientific Unions, he has been concerned with how scientists collaborate with each other in the face of human rights discrimination.

I expect each member of the scientific group here today has encountered in her or his own experience the question of how we respond to the organization of a meeting of scientists in South Africa and how we respond to the notion of bringing a South African scientist to a meeting we organize elsewhere. Where do we take our stand in the face of what we regard as discrimination of a political or social or economic character?

We hope these issues will be exposed in the following discussion in which you will join. First, Professor Ismail Mohamed.