Veteran human rights lawyer George Bizos. Veteran human rights lawyer George Bizos.
Veteran human rights lawyer George Bizos has voiced serious concern that the Protection of State Information Bill as it stands provides for prison sentences of up to 25 years.
“It will take a pretty great man or woman to make something public in the public interest if there is uncertainty whether he or she is going to serve a long term in prison,” Bizos told the National Council of Provinces ad hoc committee dealing with the bill.
While it was acceptable for a person disclosing sensitive security information to be penalised, “to expose corruption and have to serve a term of imprisonment is undemocratic and unreasonable and the courts will not give effect to it”, he said.
Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said the bill as it stood would have the effect of entrenching authority through a “security state”.
The labour federation has given notice that it intends challenging the bill in the Constitutional Court.
The Jewish Board of Deputies, the Helen Suzman Foundation and the Nelson Mandela Foundation also presented oral submissions on the third day of public hearings on Thursday.
Speaking for the Legal Resources Centre, Bizos said the bill in its present form threatened many of the values enshrined in the constitution. Seven flaws that he listed began with the absence of a public interest defence, which he said was a common law right.
Urging the committee to refer the bill to the Constitutional Court to determine if it passed constitutional muster, Bizos said: “One of the things the legislature has to decide is whether it is prepared to take the chance that… portions of this bill will probably be declared unconstitutional.
“We are concerned that if this bill is passed in its present form, there will be a very long queue of applicants to take the president and the minister of justice to court and it will be a never-ending queue. There will be a rush as to who gets there first.”
Bizos said the bill would undermine provisions of the Promotion of Access to Information Act that helped citizens access information held by the state – a constitutional right.
A further flaw, he said, was that the bill would empower the state security minister to classify information on other ministers. The bill lacked any defence against improper classification and it would be impossible to detect information that was classified improperly.
However, “quite a lot in the bill is not objectionable”, Bizos said. The Legal Resources Centre’s door was open if the committee required advice.
Vavi said the bill was open to challenge. Cosatu’s main concerns related to its scope, the disproportionate penalties it proposed, and its potential impact on democracy.
“(The government might be) unwittingly rewinding the clock by taking us back to a security state… where everything is marked confidential and where everyone seeing something marked confidential suddenly fears 15 to 25 years in prison.
“The right to information, freedom of expression and assembly and to hold ideas were the fundamental freedoms which our people fought for from time immemorial and this year we celebrate 100 years of struggle to promote those rights.”
The law should protect vital security information, but only when absolutely necessary. Allowing any organ of state to opt in to its provisions held risks for democracy.
Political Bureau