Speech by Deputy Minister Alvin Botes during a debate in Parliament entitled, “The role South Africa can play in advancing its human rights ethos by supporting the global campaign for the immediate release of Venezuelan Parliamentary Leader Cilia Flores Maduro”, Cape Town, South Africa
Honourable Speaker,
Honourable Members,
We are living through a period of geopolitical rupture in which the normative, institutional and political foundations of the post-1945 international order are being tested, strained and, in some cases, openly defied.
Antonio Gramsci warned that the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born; in that interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
That is the world before us today. The old that is dying is the unipolar moment: the assumption that one power may define legality, confer legitimacy, weaponise institutions, and redraw the limits of sovereignty at will.
The new that is struggling to be born is a genuinely multipolar, multicultural and multi-civilisational order rooted in sovereign equality, legal consistency and collective legitimacy.
And in this dangerous interregnum, morbid symptoms do indeed appear.
They appear in genocide with impunity. They appear in unlawful unilateral sanctions and illegal economic blockades. They appear in regime-change operations disguised as law enforcement. They appear in illegal targeted assassinations of heads of states, and ministers, violations of sovereignty. And they appear as wars launched in contempt of both the letter and spirit of international law. They appear in the steady substitution of law with coercion, diplomacy with intimidation, and multilateralism with raw geopolitical pressure.
The illegal abduction and rendition of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Venezuelan parliamentary leader Cilia Adela Flores Maduro by the United States on 3 January 2026 must be understood within precisely this wider pattern. This was not merely an isolated incident. It formed part of a broader erosion of legal restraint and a growing willingness by powerful states to act outside the boundaries of and the total disregard for international law while expecting others to remain bound by it.
Let us be clear: this is not only about the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela or President Nicolás Maduro and Parliamentary Leader Cilia Adela Flores Maduro.
It is about whether international law still means anything when it constrains the powerful. It is about whether sovereignty applies universally or only selectively. It is about whether multilateralism is to remain a living system of restraint or whether it is to be reduced to ceremonial language imposed on the weak and discarded by the strong.
President Maduro and Honourable Cilia Adela Flores have not been indicated by the ICC, the only permanent tribunal, founded on the Rome Statue with the mandate to investigate, prosecute, and try individuals accused of the gravest crimes. There can be no principled defence of the illegal abduction, extra-territorial transfer and rendition through unilateral military force, of President Maduro and Honourable Cilia Adela Flores.
South Africa’s foreign policy is anchored in anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, sovereign equality, peaceful resolution of disputes, international solidarity with peoples under attack, human rights and the defence of international law and multilateralism as a shield for the weak, not an instrument of the strong. Unilateral conduct through extra-territorial prosecution should be frowned upon.
If we are serious about advancing South Africa’s human rights ethos, then support for the global campaign for the immediate release of President Maduro and Honourable Cilia Adela Flores must form part of a broader strategy to defend multilateralism itself.
What, then should be done?
First, we must intensify our bilateral engagement with all states prepared to defend the basic norms of international law. South Africa must continue to strengthen diplomatic coordination and ensure that this matter remains alive in all bilateral discussions with countries across Latin America, Africa, Asia and beyond.
We must help build a coalition of states prepared to state clearly that unlawful abduction and renditions cannot be normalised. Secondly, we must use every multilateral forum available to us.
South Africa must continue raising this matter in the UNSC, UNGA, UNHCR and all relevant legal and political committees. The case cannot be allowed to disappear into procedural fatigue.
South Africa should work through the AU, for a clear continental position condemning the illegal abduction and rendition of elected leaders and parliamentarians and reaffirming that such conduct is incompatible with the UN Charter and the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Within SADC, we must ensure that our region speaks with moral clarity. Southern Africa knows from lived history the meaning of destabilisation, sanctions, external interference and proxy pressure. We must not be timid when imperialist methods reappear in new forms. Within NAM, South Africa should push for a coordinated declaration on Venezuela and on the broader doctrine of enforcement without legal constraint. NAM was born in resistance to domination. It must now rediscover that historic role in a new age of selective legality.
Within the BRICS, IBSA, Commonwealth, IORA and in our engagements with ASEAN, CELAC and the EU as well as and other formations, South Africa should advocate not only political statements, but practical coordination: diplomatic pressure, legal cooperation, solidarity mechanisms, and a renewed defence of sovereign equality and international law. Because silence, in moments such as these, is not neutrality. It is permissiveness.
Third, we should think boldly about institutional innovation. The Hague Group was established on the principle that no nation is above the law and that fragmented responses to grave violations are inadequate. That principle must now be extended with courage and consistency. South Africa should therefore explore the establishment of an international legal-diplomatic contact group for Venezuela, modelled in spirit on The Hague Group, bringing together states committed to coordinated advocacy, legal intervention, public diplomacy and the defence of sovereignty. Alternatively, we could consider whether the mandate or associated architecture of The Hague Group should be broadened so that it can respond not only to one theatre of lawlessness and genocide but to a wider global pattern in which powerful states violate international law with impunity. If international law is indivisible, then our mechanisms for defending it cannot remain selectively compartmentalised.
South Africa is uniquely placed to advance this argument. We have credibility because we have acted before. We have consistently argued that international law must be universal in application or it will lose legitimacy altogether. We have taken Israel to the ICJ for genocide and Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Minister of Defence to the ICC. We carry the moral inheritance of a liberation movement that understands, from lived history, violations of human rights and the rule of law as well as the difference between legal principle and imperial double standards.
Fourthly, we must recognise that government alone cannot carry this burden. South Africa’s non-state actors have an essential role to play.
Parliamentarians must strengthen solidarity with Venezuelan counterparts. Civil society organisations must build public awareness, mobilise solidarity campaigns and sustain pressure. Legal scholars and senior counsel should help expose the dangerous precedent created by unlawful abduction and extra-territorial prosecution. Universities and think tanks should host urgent forums on the erosion of international law, using Venezuela as a case study in the wider collapse of legal restraint. In addition, the media must resist the laundering of coercion through deceptive language.
What we face today is not merely inconsistency in the application of international law. It is something deeper and more dangerous: a crisis of legitimacy in the international system itself. Institutions are invoked when they discipline adversaries and ignored when they inconvenience allies.
International law is weaponised selectively.
Sovereignty is sacred for some and disposable for others. Human rights are elevated when useful and downgraded when they obstruct geopolitical ambition. That is why Venezuela matters. That is why President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Adela Flores Maduro matters. If the world accepts the illegal abduction and rendition of a President or a Parliamentary Leader today, then tomorrow similar encroachment on international law may be accepted as the new normal. Neither exceptionalism nor idiosyncrasy should be tolerated. Diplomatic clemency is not reconcilable with unilateralism or exceptionalism.
We call for the immediate release of President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Adela Flores Maduro. We reject the legality of their abduction and rendition through unilateral foreign military action. We affirm Venezuela’s sovereignty and the principle that no state, however powerful, may place itself above international law.
And we call on our government to intensify bilateral engagement, expand multilateral lobbying and help build a new architecture of coordinated state action in defence of international law.
More broadly we call for an end to the illegal blockade of Cuba which is now resulting in a humanitarian crisis. We call for an end to the unilateral war against Iran in violation of international law and the UN Charter.
As we conclude Human Rights Month in South Africa, we are beholden to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), read together with the UN Charter which are unequivocal on the prohibition of force: “Members must refrain from the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, as stated in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter”.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights do not provide for exceptionalism.
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