The ANC is intent on pushing for the establishment of a Media Appeals Tribunal (MAT) in the run-up to its National General Council (NGC) next month.  The proposal has its roots in a resolution adopted at the 2007 National Conference on Polokwane on the establishment of a tribunal that would “balance the right to freedom of expression, freedom of the media, with the right to equality, to privacy and human dignity for all.”

The MAT would adjudicate public complaints against print media, “in terms of decisions and rulings made by the existing self-regulatory institutions”.  According to ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu “there is no targeting of newspapers.  We will still use the same journalistic codes (but) if you go against those codes, then we should impose some punitive measures (including imprisonment).”  The MAT would be accountable to Parliament, which “would guarantee the principles of independence, transparency, accountability and fairness”.

The ANC believes that the MAT is necessary because the Press’s own system of self-regulation has failed.  Numerous ANC and SACP leaders have supported the campaign, including President Zuma, who says that the media “need to be governed themselves because at times they go overboard on the rights.”  The President added that the media claimed to be “ the watchdog of the people”,  but  “ they were never elected”.   He added that the media was not the only body which understood rights: “We at the ANC, we believe we do.  We fought for the rights“.

NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
WRITTEN REPLY

QUESTION 1938

INTERNAL QUESTION PAPER [No 17-2010]

DATE OF PUBLICATION: 26 July 2010

1938. Mr M M Swathe to as the Minister of Rural Development and Land Reform:

(a)(i)  How much government-owned land is available for redistribution and (ii) how much land has been transferred to black South Africans through normal sales and (b) what has been the success of the willing seller-willing buyer principle?   NW2326E

MINISTER OF RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND LAND REFORM:

(a)  (i)   The Department of Rural Redevelopment and Land Reform (DRDLR) has 2 345 095 million hectares of land available for redistribution.

(ii) The Deeds Registries Act, 1937 (Act No. 47 of 1937) does not provide for the categorisation of land transfers in terms of race.  Currently, only the Statistician-General is authorised to extract information of this nature in terms of section 14(1)(b) read with section 14(2)(a) of the Statistics Act, 1999 (Act No. 6 of 1999).  However, approval is awaited from the Statistician-General to enable the Branch: Deeds Registration to gather such information.  Once approval is obtained, section 10 of the Deeds Registries Act, 1937 will be amended to authorise the gathering of information relating to race.

(b)          The fact that the department is most probably not going to be able to meet the 30% land transfer by 2014 reflects that the WSWB model has not been successful.

Issued by Parliament, August 23 2010

Originally published by Politicsweb  

The Protection of Information Bill ("the Bill") was introduced in the National Assembly by the Ministry of State Security and published for comment earlier this year.  As is customary, the Bill was provided to the General Council of the Bar ("GCB") for its comment.  The GCB recently submitted its report on the Bill to the relevant Parliamentary Committee, being in this case the Joint Standing Committee on State Security.

As has been widely reported, the Bill purports to provide for the protection of certain information from disclosure, destruction and loss, and to regulate the manner in which information may be protected. In its report, the GCB has raised several concerns about the content of the Bill.  In brief, those concerns are the following:

(a) Information which genuinely requires protection from disclosure, and which in terms of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Act, No. 108 of 1996 ("the Constitution") may legitimately be withheld from a person desiring access to that information, is already capable of being kept out of the public eye in terms of existing legislation, namely, the Promotion of Access to Information Act, No. 2 of 2000 ("PAIA").

(b) Section 32 of the Bill of Rights enshrined in the Constitution provides that "Everyone has the right of access to any information held by the State", and provides further that national legislation must be enacted to give effect to this right. This provision of the Constitution is subject, of course, to section 36, which provides that all rights in the Bill of Rights (which includes the right of access to information in terms of section 32), may be limited only in terms of law of general application to the extent that the limitation is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom, but that no law may otherwise limit any right entrenched in the Bill of Rights.

Landowners who refuse amounts offered during expropriation should have their land taken away with no payment, ANC Youth League chief Julius Malema said on Friday.

"Willing seller, willing buyer is not working, Black Economic Empowerment is not working," Malema told the Mail & Guardian when asked what the ANCYL meant when it said it did not want leaders to tell the queen (of England) that economic policies would not change.

Malema said that in 10 years, a certain percentage of land should have been transferred to the majority of the population.

"It's a simple policy. We're going to take the land, but we'll compensate and we'll determine the price. We go to [Eugene] Terre'Blanche's farm and say: for these many hectares we will give you R2-million, thank you very much.

 "If you say that's too little and you don't want it, then we take the land and give you nothing. It's called expropriation with compensation determined by the state."

Without mentioning President Jacob Zuma, who travelled to the United Kingdom earlier this year and met Queen Elizabeth II, he said that when the ANCYL was formed, it was opposed to forms of struggle such as petitions, or "sending delegations to the queen".