Cape Town - The Right 2 Know campaign on Tuesday expressed dismay at government’s stated plan to pass the contested Protection of State Information Bill into law after it had spent 18 months on the back burner.
“Given the Presidency’s silence on the Secrecy Bill in the past 18 months, it would have been fair to assume that government had effectively rejected the draconian bill,” said the pressure group, which was launched in 2010 and has spearheaded opposition to the legislation.
It said, given the fundamental flaws retained in the final draft adopted by Parliament in November 2013, the right thing would be either to scrap the bill in its current form and return to the drawing board or to refer it directly to the Constitutional Court for certification.
“The right thing to do is to either send it back to Parliament to start afresh, or to refer it directly to the Constitutional Court.”
This call was repeatedly made in the past by opposition parties and other critics of the bill, among them Cosatu, who warned that it was the State’s only way of pre-empting a Constitutional Court challenge of the legislation.
The bill, which is yet to be signed by President Jacob Zuma, seeks to replace apartheid era legislation on classification of state information but has been widely criticised as being equally regressive.
State security ministry spokesman Brian Dube confirmed that the department was in the “advanced stages” of drafting regulations for the bill, which he said remained for the moment with President Zuma.
State Security Minister David Mahlobo’s predecessor Siyabonga Cwele in 2013 introduced eleventh-hour amendments that watered down some of the bill’s most contentious clauses but rejected calls to include a public interest defence to allow anybody charged with a prisonable offence for exposing state secrets to plead that they had done so for the greater good.
The Right 2 Know said this meant that journalists and whistleblowers would risk jail for seeking to hold government to account if the bill became law.
“The media reports on South Africa’s ‘spy cables’ scandal in March 2015 show exactly the damage that could be done by the Secrecy Bill. Those reports uncovered important information in the public interest,” the group said.
“Yet these public reports could easily have been criminalised under the Secrecy Bill’s broad and elastic definition of ‘espionage’, which carries penalties of up to 25 years in jail, and has no public interest defence.”
ANA