President Robert Mugabe’s attempts to muzzle the press received a temporary setback on Wednesday when Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court struck down key sections of a law that makes it a criminal offence to publish ”falsehoods”.
The court declared that two sections of an Act the government used to arrest and charge 16 journalists in the past year was unconstitutional. Sections 80 (1) and (2) of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act declare that ”publishing a falsehood” is a crime punishable by up to two years in jail.
Government lawyers did not even attempt to defend the sections when lawyers for the Daily News newspaper said it was unconstitutional. The nation’s highest court then ruled the sections to be invalid.
The reprieve for journalists is likely to be temporary. The Mugabe government has presented an amended version of the law to Parliament, which requires proof that a journalist intended to print something that was false.
The court’s decision is a particular blow to the Information Minister, Jonathan Moyo, who personally crafted the legislation and pushed it through Parliament, despite warnings that it was unconstitutional.
The nullified sections of the law were shown to be questionable when the courts acquitted this correspondent in July last year, on the grounds that the government prosecutor had not proved the intention to publish a false story.
The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) hailed the court decision as ”a victory for democracy and must surely have left egg on the face of Jonathan Moyo, who stubbornly refused to listen to all the voices of reason that told him that the law was as unconstitutional as it was primitively vindictive”.
MDC spokesman Paul Themba Nyathi said the decision was a blow to the Mugabe government’s efforts ”to deny people their freedoms and adds more misery to the beleaguered regime, which has been flattened by one blow after another from the forces of peace”.
Media groups welcomed the ruling, but said all the laws aimed at muzzling the press must be thrown out. — Â