The NGO Working Committee was founded in November 1999 by a number of individuals and ten NGOs that had been involved in the TRC process either on an official level or as members of civil society concerned with the plight of victims of apartheid. The Black Sash initiated the establishment of this NGO coalition. The committee acted as a lobby and pressure group to ensure that Government implements the recommendations regarding Reparation and Rehabilitation made by the TRC in its final Report of 1998. Consequently, the records that make up this collection document the monitoring and lobbying activities of the Committee.

Following the handover of the TRC’s Final Report in 1998, a group of NGOs based in the Western Cape banded together in 1999 to form a coalition to put pressure on the South African government to implement the TRC’s recommendations vis-à-vis the payment of reparations to victims of gross human rights violations. This group became known as the NGO Working Group on Reparations (NGOWGR) under the leadership of Fr Michael Lapsley of the Institute for the Healing of Memories. (A similar coalition had been formed in Johannesburg in 1997. Although there was some interaction between the two groups, they largely operated independently of one another.)

The NGOWGR aided the fight for reparations primarily by writing letters to the press and prominent members of government and the TRC, making phone calls to key role players, arranging meetings with them, and so on, in order to keep the issue of reparations under the spotlight. In doing so, it had to work closely with other victim support groups, such as the Khulumani Support Group (KSG), a national victim support and advocacy group formed in 1995 to assist victims through the TRC process. The relationship between the two groups was sometimes strained, with KSG believing that the process of obtaining reparations ought to be victim-driven, and that other “liberal” groups detracted from this focus.

Among the NGOs that were involved in the NGOWGR were the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, Jubilee South Africa, The Trauma Centre, Black Sash, Legal Resources Centre and the Quaker Peace Centre.