The Supreme Court in Zimbabwe on Wednesday struck out a section of a controversial media law that makes it an offence for a journalist to publish falsehoods, declaring it unconstitutional.
The decision was made after two journalists accused of publishing false information challenged the constitutionality of the law enacted after President Robert Mugabe was re-elected in March last year.
The state conceded that the section of law which refers to publishing of falsehoods was unconstitutional and the court made a ruling within minutes of the session opening.
”It is hereby declared to be ultra vires section 20 (1) of the constitution and is therefore struck down and is of no force or effect,” said chief justice Godfrey Chidyausiku.
Two Zimbabwean journalists, Geoffrey Nyarota and Lloyd Mudiwa, were last year accused of abusing their journalistic privileges by publishing false information after the newspaper they work for broke a story alleging that pro-government militias had beheaded a woman in front of her children.
Charges were brought against Nyarota, an award-winning former editor of the Daily News, and Mudiwa, a reporter on the paper, Zimbabwe’s only independent daily, because the story was subsequently shown to be false.
The paper later retracted the story and offered an apology when it was established that the main source of the story, a man claiming to be the dead woman’s husband, had fabricated the incident.
The Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) was signed into law by President Robert Mugabe last year just after his re-election in March 2002.
The controversial law has already been challenged in court by several different groups of journalists, including the foreign correspondents association.
Early this year Information Minister Jonathan Moyo said the government was amending the controversial media law in bid to ‘rationalise’ it.
”We are amending because we realise at the time we enacted it the temperatures were very high, but when the storm has gone you sit back and rationalise and we are sitting back to rationalise because the storm is gone,” Moyo said.
He added that it was necessary at the time to introduce such tough laws ”to send a very clear and unequivocal message and we believe it has (been sent)”. – Sapa-AFP