OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Thursday
SOUTH Africa’s judiciary gets its first chance to address the constitutionality of hate speech in a case that went before the Johannesburg High Court this week.
The Islamic Unity Convention (IUC) lodged an application with the court to set aside a decision by the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) after complaints about a programme on Holocaust denial that aired on a Cape Town Muslim community radio station in 1998.
Radio 786, owned by the IUC, is opposing the IBA and the Jewish Board of Deputies, the Minister of Communications and the Broadcasting Monitoring Complaints Commission in a matter that may go all the way to the Constitutional Court.
The Cape Town radio station broadcast a programme over two years ago discussing the ideology of Zionism and the founding of Israel, a show which the South African Jewish Board of Deputies say promoted the controversial view that the Holocaust did not really happen in the way history has it recorded.
In the initial complaint, the Board quoted excerpts from the radio programme including; “the camps were brutal labour camps and anybody who alleges anything else is lying”.
A comment, attributed to Muslim historian Dr Yaqub Zaki, read: “I accept that 1-million plus Jews died during the Second World War but I dispute the fact that they were murdered, that they were killed by gassing. These people died like the other people in the camps from infectious diseases and epidemic diseases, particularly typhus”.
The SAJBD lodged a complaint with the IBA, arguing that this programme promoted anti-Semitism and was offending to Jews.
The Islamic Unity Convention disputed this, saying that the IBA was biased in its handling of the matter and failed to follow its own procedures.
Of greater significance, however, is the constitutional aspect of the appeal.
The broadcaster wants the High Court to declare section 2(a) of the code of Conduct for Broadcasting Services unconstitutional on the grounds that it places an unfair limitation on Radio 786’s freedom of speech.
The Jewish Board of Deputies contend that to set aside the IBA’s provision would permit the broadcast of hate speech.