(MISA/IFEX) – The following is an 8 July 2003 MISA press statement: Media call to scrap Terror Bill The South African chapter of the Media Institute for Southern Africa (MISA-SA) has added its voice to calls by the South African National Editors Forum and Freedom of Expression Institute for the immediate withdrawal of the draft […]
(MISA/IFEX) – The following is an 8 July 2003 MISA press statement:
Media call to scrap Terror Bill
The South African chapter of the Media Institute for Southern Africa (MISA-SA) has added its voice to calls by the South African National Editors Forum and Freedom of Expression Institute for the immediate withdrawal of the draft Anti-Terrorism Bill on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and a danger to democratic media.
MISA-SA is concerned that the intended law will detrimentally affect working South African journalists and media workers.
The Terror Bill will erode the confidential relationship between journalists and their sources, upon which the credibility of the media and security of journalists is maintained, by imposing a duty to supply information about “terrorist” acts or “terrorist” organisations, thereby eroding the media’s ability to fairly, safely and impartially provide coverage of political conflict in the public interest in accordance with its constitutional responsibility. This would turn the media into the equivalent of apartheid-era snoops and “impimpi” and make it impossible for them to do their job.
MISA-SA said the Terror Bill would only serve to curb South Africans’ hard won freedoms, especially the rights to free expression, the free and fair presentation of news, media freedom and freedom of association enshrined in Articles 17, 18, 19 and 22 of the International Covenant of Human Rights. The Terror Bill in its present form would have the effect of hampering journalists in their gathering and reporting of certain political issues of legitimate public interest.
According to the organisation, the draft Terror Bill was prepared too hastily and posed a threat to civil liberties due to its often vague and ambiguous qualification of what constitutes “terrorist” organisations and “terrorist” acts. This would make publishing news and information on “terrorist” activities unlawful. The proposed law presently defines terrorism as “an unlawful act, committed in or outside the Republic” or any act “likely to intimidate the public or a segment of the public”.
In a written submission to the Committee on Safety and Security, MISA-SA concluded that certain elements of the Bill are incongruent with the South African constitution because they failed to safeguard the legitimate rights of citizens to dissent, organise, express, and mobilise and of journalists to broadcast or publish news and information about anything that could be construed as “terrorism”.
Human rights advocate George Bizos, the National Director of Public Prosecutions, COSATU and several other human rights and legal bodies have also decried the Anti-Terrorism Bill as fatally flawed, vague, draconian and defining terrorism too broadly.
The organisation criticised the bill for being reminiscent of the worst authoritarian laws of the apartheid regime in its restriction of most forms of legitimate protest, criticism of government and media coverage of such criticism and groups declared to be radical or terrorist in nature.
While MISA-SA acknowledged South Africa’s need to create or amend laws to give effect to the United Nations’ Anti-Bombing Convention and recent resolutions of the African Union and Non-Aligned Movement relating to combating domestic and international terrorism and maintaining public order, the organisation said that combating terrorism could be more suitably effected by scrapping the bill and altering aspects of existing South African statutes, rather than tabling a brand new bill.
The organisation said that if such a bill had to be passed, it must acknowledge the basic rights of all citizens to express, organise, mobilise and receive intelligence freely and the special position of the media to support and maintain democracy.
