The Film and Publications Amendment Bill, which this week received the nod from the South African Cabinet, has crucial long-term implications for the future of the free exchange of ideas in South Africa, says official opposition Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon.
In his regular internet column on Friday, SA Today, the DA leader said the Bill “is a proposed amendment to the Film and Publications Act [Act No. 65 of 1996] — always an arena of controversy in a country with a long history of censorship under apartheid”.
While the professed aim of the latest amendment to a much-amended Bill is the protection of minors from sexual exploitation in the media, and this is “an obviously laudable aim no reasonable South African would oppose”, mixed in “is a brief insertion that for the first time brings print publications within the ambit of the Act, and raises the prospect of press censorship”.
Leon warned that “it is often through the back door, rather than through the front entrance, that the slide away in civil liberties occurs. And no doubt the government, in its clumsy way, will denounce anyone who opposes this Bill as being in favour of child pornography.”
He said “most alarmingly”, the Bill augments a concept first slipped into the Act by way of a 2004 amendment, that of prior restraint. “Prior restraint” implies that a body, “in this instance the Film and Publications Board, has a right to scrutinise material intended for publication — and thus to censor it before it is published”.
In order to ensure that the ruling African National Congress does not simply get its way, he appealed to civil society, media organisations, NGOs and activists to flood the Home Affairs portfolio committee with objections, petitions and requests to speak, so that the tide of public opinion against the proposed amendment turns into a veritable flood. — I-Net Bridge