‘Censorship’ Bill unconstitutional, say Parliament’s lawyers

A Business Day report says the committee has heard a barrage of testimony from media and media freedom organisations claiming that on a number of grounds the constitutionality guaranteed freedom of the press is threatened in the Bill. Yesterday, lawyers from the Home Affairs Department and the Film and Publications Board were at odds with Parliamentary legal advisers over whether the Bill would pass constitutional muster without amendments. In contrast to the board’s view, Parliament’s legal adviser, Ntuthuzele Vanara, insisted that the removal of the exemptions and the granting of parallel authority to regulate broadcasting were unconstitutional. Full Business Day report

Parliament\'s legal advisors warned, for example, that the proposed legislation could see the Films and Publications Board (FPB) become a broadcast-media regulator. Refilwe Mathabathe said: ‘Section 192 of the Constitution recognises only the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) as a regulator, according to a report on the Mail & Guardian Online site. It would therefore be unconstitutional to bring broadcasters under the FPB,’ she said. Mathabathe also raised concern about section 16 of the draft Bill, saying if left unchanged, the provision compelled newspapers to submit all their stories to the board before publication. ‘This amounts to censorship,’ she added. The board’s CE Shokie Bopape-Dlomo conceded the organisation would not have the capacity to go through all the newspapers stories before they were published. ‘This was not the intention of the Bill; I think it is the wording in that section that has created a misunderstanding,’ she said. However, she disagreed it would be unconstitutional to allow the board to examine television programmes. The Bill is aimed at cracking down on child pornography and abuse, but has come under fire from the media. Last week, the SA National Editors\' Forum (Sanef) and other media organisations renewed their call for several ‘constitutionally objectionable’ provisions in the draft Bill to be omitted from the final legislation. Full report on Mail & Guardian Online site

Media academic Anton Harber says the broadside against the media reminds him of the tactics of the apartheid government. In his column in Business Day he writes: ‘In 1986, the apartheid government tried to drive a wedge between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘alternative’ media. They met with managers of the large newspaper groups and assured them that repressive state of emergency media regulations would not target their fine, professional products, but only those pesky and outspoken tabloids which broke the rules of what was acceptable at the time. All the mainstream papers had to do was to distance themselves from the others and they would escape the threat of closure, heavy fines or even jail. They would just have to accept a few ‘guidelines’. The Newspaper Press Union, then the voice of the mainstream papers, was divided about accepting the offer of immunity and a significant number were ready to dump papers they did not like much anyway. In the end, NPU members could not agree among themselves and never took up the offer. It was a key moment in the fight for a free media in SA.\' Read the Harber column in Business Day