Judge Taswell Papier: A ‘shield of justice’ for the most marginalised

There is a kind of lawyer, often rarer than truth in a courtroom, who takes on the case nobody else will, charges nothing, and sleeps soundly. Taswell Papier was that person.

Later, as a judge of the Western Cape Division of the High Court, he carried the same conviction to the bench: that the law, however imposing its architecture, exists to serve those least able to navigate it. When he died on 7 April 2026, aged 64, after four years living with pancreatic cancer, South Africa lost a jurist who had spent four decades making good on a promise he had made to himself as a student activist on the Cape Flats.

Judge Taswell Desmond Papier grew up in the communities that shaped the western edge of Cape Town, a world of modest houses, police curfews, and a government that sorted human beings by the shade of their skin. He completed his schooling at St Columba’s High School in Athlone, before arriving at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) to study law.

The university, established by the apartheid regime as an institution for so-called coloured students, had by then become something the government had not intended: a crucible of resistance. Papier was among those who made it so. He studied through the states of emergency, the mass arrests, and the state’s escalating violence against its own citizenry.

“If it were not for UWC, I would probably not have been a lawyer and consequently a judge,” he later said.

The Attorney of Mitchells Plain

After graduating, Papier worked as a prosecutor before completing his articles and opening his own legal practice in Mitchells Plain, the township on Cape Town’s southern peninsula. Over the following 17 years, his office became something closer to a community refuge than a commercial firm. He represented many students and school learners arrested by the police during protests, as well as members of liberation movements charged with treason, sabotage and membership of banned organisations. Much of it he did without charge.

Ruschda Semaar, the mother of the late journalist Karima Brown and a close family friend who collaborated with him during those years, recalls the weight of their work.

“We held night courts for the detained so that they didn’t have to stay in the cells, and we assisted families of the detainees. Nothing was too big or too small for Papier’s attention, and the word ‘no’ was one he rarely used,” she said.

Baronise Henry, who first encountered Papier as a young candidate attorney in Mitchells Plain, offers a portrait of the man she met then, and the man he remained.

“A quiet and humble gentleman,” she says. “When he became a senior attorney and later a judge, he remained a soft-spoken and unassuming man without any self-importance.”

A scholarship to Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Programme came at a pivotal moment: SA was holding its first democratic elections, and the man who had spent years defending those who fought for that right was now studying the international frameworks that might protect it. He completed a Master of Laws in Human Rights there, then returned to Mitchells Plain, and to his practice.

A pioneer of pro bono law

Papier’s firm eventually merged with ENSafrica (previously Sonnenberg, Hoffman & Galombik), one of SA’s largest legal practices, where he became a senior partner specialising in corporate and commercial law. The move might have looked, to the untrained eye, like a retreat from principle. It was nothing of the sort.

At ENSafrica, Papier led the pro bono department and quietly transformed what had been a voluntary gesture into an institutional expectation. He pioneered pro bono programmes across the legal profession, arguing successfully that they be made a professional requirement for attorneys and advocates alike.

The work earned him international recognition, including the United Kingdom Global Lawyer of the Year Award, an honour for his contributions to human rights and access to justice, and a fellowship at the College of Law Practice Management in Boston.

“He always believed in listening first, acting later,” says Advocate Rod Solomons, a friend, comrade and fellow legal practitioner who served with Papier on the African National Congress’s legal task team during elections. “He was not one for confrontation, he was about finding a win-win solution. His clarity of thought was striking, and it was a source of comfort to have him around. His passing is a loss to the Bench and our jurisprudence, because he had so much more to contribute.”

He continued to study, obtaining a Master of Laws in Commercial Law from the University of Cape Town and a Certificate in Mediation from the London School of Mediation. The accumulation of qualifications was less ambition than habit: he was constitutionally incapable of not learning.

On the Bench

Some of Papier’s colleagues had long considered him judicial material. He had served in an acting capacity in the Western Cape Division of the High Court on two separate occasions before his permanent appointment to the Bench in November 2017, a nomination that came from his peers in the National Association of Democratic Lawyers, where he had held numerous official positions.

From the Bench, he presided over matters that helped shape the development of constitutional rights, administrative justice and equitable legal principles. Some jurists, however, allege that his close ties with the disputatious then Judge President of the Western Cape Division of the High Court, Dr John Hlophe (later impeached), were problematic and bordered on the sycophantic. He was described by critics as an ally of Hlophe.

His wife, Professor Joy Papier, however, portrays the man she was married to for 37 years as “unfailingly polite, and a stickler for doing things the right way. He was deeply committed to justice for all, and believed that the law should serve the most marginalised.”

His friend and colleague, Judge Vincent Saldanha, says: “Judge Taswell Papier was more than just a colleague on the Bench of the Western Cape High Court. We enjoyed a close friendship over many decades that began as law students in the turbulent years of the student protests of the 1980s.

“Taswell was a deeply committed activist that extended to his role in later years as an attorney. Besides all of that, he spent much time with his cherished family, travelled extensively with his dear wife Joy, often sailed a boat around the East Coast, spent hours in his beautiful garden [in Steenberg Estate] and honoured the title of the Saturday morning ‘bakkie builder’ as he personally attended to all of the handy work at his house with much passion and zeal. As a friend and to so many others, he displayed a generosity of spirit,” he says.

‘Bullied and threatened’

Father Michael Weeder, retired Dean of St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town, says: “I met Taswell in the months after [Nelson] Mandela was released. Ashton, one of the Boland towns, erupted in a way that had not happened in years of Struggle resistance of the 1980s, with people being arrested on a level that we often had to bring in lawyers. The Western Province Council of Churches’s Dependence Conference provided lawyers based in Worcester,” he said.

“Bonita, my spouse, while I was on the phone to the Dependence Conference, said: ‘Ask for black lawyers,’ and she qualified this to say that you know the people here get oppressed by white people, they are bullied and threatened, their whole quality of life – that it’s negative and upside down – everything is regulated by white people.’

“That is how we met Taswell Papier,” he says. “One Saturday evening a police officer came to Ashton. Got drunk in the pub there. Was roughed up, soe ’n bietjie, robbed of his service gun. It was brought to me for safekeeping.

“That same day I had to speak in Bredasdorp on a 16 June-related matter. I only came back late at night and I then had to do my pastoral rounds the Sunday. I was on the road early and came back around lunchtime. I called Taswell and asked what I had to do [with the gun].

“He said to take it to the police, as I put the phone down there is a knock on the door. It was the local detective; he looked for the gun. I was accused of illegal possession of a firearm. There are like five charges without a licence, and it was Taswell that got me off the charges. A gift of a man and Joy his beloved wife were, and are, enchanting beyond words,” he said.

The measure of a man

Those who knew Papier reach for the same words: self-effacing and patrician. He mentored younger lawyers, making himself available to students and junior practitioners in the way that only someone uninterested in their own importance can. In a tribute, the University of the Western Cape’s Dean of the Faculty of Law, Professor Jacques de Ville, recalled how Papier invited a student from UWC’s Accelerated Excellence Programme to sit in on court proceedings, a gesture as characteristic of the man as any of his formal achievements.

“Use disadvantage to your advantage, and always contribute in any way you can to addressing the plight of others,” Papier once told students at UWC. “There is no substitute for arduous work. Be constructive, inclusive and unifying in your approach.”

Ruby Marks, South Africa’s Ambassador to the Republic of Benin and Togo, says: “Shaped by the Cape Flats, he fearlessly served as a shield of justice when it was needed most.”

Papier leaves behind the credo that the law must bend towards those with the least power. He is survived by his wife, Professor Joy Papier; their son, Roscoe; their daughter, Kayla; and his mother, father and sister. DM

Judge Taswell Papier, born 6 November 1961, died 7 April 2026.