The Economic Relations Between The South African Republic And Switzerland On The Background Of The Sanctions Of The UN Against The Apartheid Regime

The aim of this paper is to examine to which extend did the activities of the Swiss economic actors and the Swiss government help to maintain the apartheid regime in South Africa. It is focused on the famous Swiss banking sector and its relations with its Southafrican clients. One part of the paper is concentrated on the question of breaking the sanctions adopted by the Security Council of the UN, which should have helped to undermine the local rasist regime. The crucial issue in this problematic is to make clear if one non-UN-memberlaw-breaker could be really able to ensure the survival of the weakened regime. I discuss the relevance of the financial and economic cooperation between the SAR and Switzerland and try to show, that Swiss activities really provided the badly needed capital and foreign currencies to the regime in the period of its deepest crisis.But on the other hand that Switzerland was not the only one business partner of the apartheid regime among the western powers and that the decisive role in its elimination was besides sanctions played mainly by other factors. The lack of any obligation for the UN-member states of respecting the sanctions, a great degree of invention on the side of the SAR when replacing the import from its former partners and other belong among them.