Date of Birth: 
About Hans Diergaardt
- Johannes Gerard Adolph Diergaardt, more commonly known as Hans Diergaardt (16 September 1927 – 13 February 1998) was a Namibian politician active for nearly a decade after Namibia gained independence.
- Prior to that, he was elected as the fifth Kaptein of the then-autonomous Baster community at Rehoboth, succeeding Dr.
- Ben Africa in 1979 after winning a court challenge to the disputed election of 1976. Both before and after independence, Diergaardt founded several local political parties, among them the Federal Convention of Namibia.
- He represented this party as a member of the Constituent Assembly of Namibia, convened to draft the constitution for the new nation of Namibia. Diergaardt is known for his criticism of black-majority rule in the early years of independent Namibia.
- Believing that minority group rights were not sufficiently protected, he led a legal suit to establish autonomy for Rehoboth Gebied, the historic district of Baster settlement, which had a kind of autonomy under German colonial and South African rule.
- The nation's Supreme Court ruled that Rehoboth had no special status in the newly independent Namibia.
- Before his death, Diergaardt filed an official complaint in 1998 with the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which ruled in 2000.
- It declined to rule on one issue, but concluded that Namibia was exercising linguistic discrimination against the Afrikaans-speaking Basters.
Read more at Wikipedia