A ‘hidden hand’ is steering the Secrecy Bill

Published in Legalbrief Today
Mon 06 June 2011

‘Who is guiding the Protection of Information Bill?’

In an analysis in Business Day, Alison Tilley and Murray Hunter – members of the Right2Know campaign’s national working group – note that State Security Minister Siyabonga Cwele has twice descended on a parliamentary committee, agreeing to remove commercial information from the Bill and narrowing the definition of national security. This, they argue, brings into question the independence of the committee from the executive, over which it theoretically exercises oversight. ‘The committee took up Cwele’s proposals and put them in a draft Bill, which was apparently the work of ANC member Llewellyn Landers. That is not the Bill, however, that the committee is voting through. It is voting through another version of the Bill, which contains wording excluded from the Landers draft.’ Says Tilley and Hunter: ‘The Landers draft has been withdrawn, and this new version is now being voted on. So where did the new version come from?’ They note that ‘most concerning of all, given the possibility of a hidden hand guiding the committee’s agenda, is that the Bill exempts the intelligence sector from public scrutiny altogether, drawing a veil over the workings of our spooks.’

Full analysis in Business Day

The issue is also taken up by Pierre de Vos on his Constitutionally Speaking blog. In an article examining what he calls ‘a draconian piece of legislation’, he says he cannot understand why the good people in the ANC remain quiet while their colleagues plot to turn SA into a secretive security state. De Vos writes: ‘Every person of conscience who belongs to the ANC and serves in a leadership position in the ANC has a duty to speak out against this Bill. Those good people in the ANC who fail to speak out will surely not be able to look themselves in the mirror ever again. This is not a trivial issue on which one can remain tactically silent. Either one speaks out, or one reveals oneself to be a unprincipled, undemocratic or cowardly supporter of censorship or even authoritarianism.’

Full article on the Constitutionally Speaking blog

Source: Legalbrief Today