On 11 July 1963, the High Command of the ANC was caught at Lilliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, one of them being Govan Mbeki. To hold the prisoners, the General Laws Amendment Act, Number 37 of 1963, was rushed through Parliament and applied retrospectively to 27 June 1962, mainly but not exclusively so that the people arrested at Rivonia could be detained and held in solitary confinement. In July of the same year, Mbeki began mobilising international support against apartheid. Horrified at the Act, Mbeki led a successful motion in the Student Union to condemn the move and join the boycott of South African goods. He strongly condemned the South African government's new restrictions on political activity and likened it to in the politics of Nazi Germany. In April 1964, Mbeki appeared before a delegation of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid to plead for the life of his father, who by then had been charged with planning an armed uprising against the state. The death penalty seemed a certainty for all the Rivonia Treason Trialists. This was the first time Mbeki had spoken about his father from the perspective of a son, but the biological category was converted into a political context.