By Kouthar Sambo
Parliament has formally begun the public hearings in Limpopo into the General Intelligence Laws Amendment Bill (Spy Bill), which proposes new regulations related to security vetting and spying.
The Bill has drawn strong criticism from civil society as it infringes on the privacy of citizens and institutions.
Speaking on VOC’s DriveTime show on Monday, Executive Director of the Campaign for Free Expression Anton Harber said that the end of the “Zuma period” of state capture saw a high level of a review panel to look at state security.
“We know that the abuse of the agency played a key role in state capture, so there was a series of recommendations on reform that needed to be made to ensure this is not repeated,” explained Harber.
According to Harber, the objective is to improve oversight and control of South Africa’s intelligence services, but questions about whether or not this will materialize have been raised.
“The Bill itself is not all bad as it splits the state security agency into a national one and an international one: one that looks into internal matters and one that looks at international threats to our state security,” stressed Harber.
Harber added that the bill will be challenged, and we will be amongst those who challenge it while there are elements of the bill that will not stand scrutiny by the Constitutional Court.
“The measures in this bill apply across civil society and not just to ogranisation behaving improperly. In its current form, it would provide a tool where the clamp down on civil society has taken away many of the protections against state and government abuse that used to exist here,” said Harber.
“Civil society played a crucial role in countering state capture and in exposing corruption, and there are elements of this bill that can easily be used to constrain and limit civil society organisation,” reiterated Harber.
Photo: Pexels
