1 October 2012 | Press Releases
Dene Smuts, Shadow Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development
It is a joy to see the Constitutional Court give the censors a dose of their own medicine in Print Media SA and Sanef versus the Minister of Home Affairs and Film and Publications Board. Judge Skweyiya, seizing the scalpel on behalf of a unanimous court, surgically performed “the complete excision” of the system of compulsory administrative prior restraint of protected speech. It was the Film and Publications Board itself that proposed the system of pre-publication censorship under which committees of uncles and aunties appointed by the Board, which is itself appointed by the Minister of Home Affairs, decide – just as in the bad old days – what may be published and what citizens may or may not see. They therefore become the bearers of the right to free expression, instead of the publishers, editors, writers and other creative persons, as the Court said.
