The publishers of a banned Zimbabwean daily have launched a legal appeal against a decision by a government media commission last week denying them a licence to publish, their lawyer said on Wednesday.
”We have filed an appeal to the Administrative Court and we are now waiting for a date of the hearing,” Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe’s (ANZ) lawyer Mordecai Mahlangu said.
”We are also going to apply to the High Court for a review of the determination by the Media and Information Commission [MIC].”
ANZ’s the Daily News and the Daily News on Sunday were banned nearly two years ago for breaching the country’s tough media laws by operating without a licence from the MIC.
The commission last Monday refused for the second time to grant the newspaper group a licence to operate as a media service provider.
In its latest ruling, the commission said the company breached media laws by, among other things, employing unaccredited journalists, failing to submit copies of its newspapers to the commission and employing a reporter convicted of criminal defamation.
Mahlangu said the commission ignored the merits of the company’s fresh application that it made in March.
He said ANZ’s application satisfied registration requirements but the media commission denied it a licence for a second time because it had previously breached the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
Former Zimbabwean information minister Jonathan Moyo, who is credited with crafting the tough media laws, said in a statement last week the reasons given by the MIC to refuse to register ANZ were ”scandalous” and had no legal basis.
Moyo, who fell out with President Robert Mugabe in December, said the commission’s decision ”at once irreparably damages … the MIC itself, the reputation of the government and the nation from the standpoint of the good administration of justice”.
The newspapers were closed down in September 2003 after the country’s Supreme Court ruled that they violated the country’s media laws by operating without a licence.
Once the country’s best-selling daily, identified by its blue masthead, the Daily News was reduced to a handful of former managers and journalists occupying a small office in central Harare.
On March 14, the Supreme Court set aside the government commission’s refusal to register the two newspapers and ordered the commission to give ANZ another opportunity to apply for a licence.
The court, however, upheld several sections of the media laws that have been invoked to ban four independent newspapers, deport several foreign correspondents and arrest scores of local journalists. — Sapa-AFP