President Cyril Ramaphosa today described the death of the late Human Rights lawyer George Bizos as a great tree falling.
The president accorded Bizos, who died at the age of 92 last week, an official state funeral today.
Bizos is best remembered as part of the defence team for the Rivonia Trialists including the country’s first democratic president, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Elias Motsoaledi, Ahmed Kathrada, Andrew Mlangeni, among others.
Ramaphosa said Bizos was a titan of the legal profession whose defence of the cause of justice was as tenacious as it was lifelong.
“There can be no doubt that his personal background influenced and nourished the great well of empathy, compassion and solidarity that drove George in the practice of his craft. He was, in his own words, a lover of freedom,” Ramaphosa said delivering his eulogy.
“And love of freedom would put him on an inevitable collision course with the apartheid State,” he added.
Ramaphosa said Bizos, an immigrant from Greece, was a man guided foremost by his conscience.
He reminded the nation that it was Bizos who added the words “if needs be” into Mandela’s statement during the Rivonia Trial.
