/ 27 May 2011

Filibuster plan to block Information Bill in Parliament

The IFP has called on political parties to thwart the passage through Parliament of the controversial Protection of Information Bill by filibustering.

The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) has called on political parties to resist the passage through Parliament of the controversial Protection of Information Bill — by filibustering in the legislature.

The call was made on Friday, by IFP MP Mario Oriani-Ambrosini, a member of the ad-hoc committee on the Protection of Information Bill.

Filibustering is the exploitation of parliamentary procedure to delay or halt the passage of a piece of legislation in the house.

Ambrosini argued that the ANC’s clear intent to push the Bill through warranted a new campaign of action against the proposed legislation.

In a week of fraught deliberations on the Bill, the ANC has hardened its position on the matter, most notably refusing to consider the introduction of a public interest defence clause into the proposed law.

The ‘secrecy” Bill, as it has become known, is an attempt to legislate the classification of state information.

Concessions
While the ANC has made certain concessions, such as excluding commercial information from the Bill’s ambit, as well as removing the vague term “in the national interest”, its opponents argue it remains too broad in its application, and gives the minister of state security too much control over state information.

The Bill contains harsh punishments for individuals, caught in possession of classified information, and without a public interest defence it condemns people who leak information, even in if it is justifiably in the public interest, to jail time.

Ambrosini argued that the manner in which the Bill was being processed by Parliament revealed a ‘backlash” within the ANC against its own liberal agenda, which for the past 15 years had moved the country away from its apartheid past.

‘On a variety of issues there is a backlash, and this is just the first of many other bills, moving through Parliament, that indicate that the days of expanding freedoms are gone,” he said.

Security apparatchiks
He said the manner in which the Bill was being processed, indicated that it was being driven by security apparatchiks outside of Parliament, rather than under the direction of the majority party’s own MPs.

‘It is painful to see a Bill of this importance being written elsewhere than Parliament,” he said.

The power that the Bill currently extended to the minister of state security to classify information across all organs of state, was creating a ‘super power behind power”, a power beyond Parliament as well as Cabinet, argued Ambrosini.

‘He who controls intelligence under this Bill will be controlling everything that happens within government departments.”

Of further concern was the ‘obstinate refusal” by the majority party to include a public interest defence, despite the fact that during public hearings on the Bill, all presentations made on the matter requested that such a provision be included, he said.

This was evidence of a clear break between public policy and public opinion, said Ambrosini, which meant the call for MPs to consider filibustering was warranted.

The tactic has until now not been used in South Africa’s democratic Parliament.

This was because the rules of Parliament are more restrictive than they have ever been in South Africa’s history, he said.

But Ambrosini refused to be drawn on how any planned filibustering was likely to work, or where the rules of Parliament allowed the tactic, saying only that it would require an ‘element of surprise”.