Press censorship in South Africa is being steadily extended to prevent reporting on the treatment or deaths of political detainees. The Police Act Amendment Bill and the Inquest Act Amendment Bill, both introduced in March, will have the effect of inhibiting press coverage of these and other matters relating to security police behaviour.
The Inquest Amendment Bill makes it an offence to 'prejudice, influence or anticipate' the proceedings or findings of an inquest after the investigation into the cause of death has commenced. This will effectively silence the family, witnesses and press until after the inquest is over, though it is not clear at what stage the investigation will be deemed to have commenced. The regular postponement of some recent inquests into unnatural deaths by detainees indicates that this new piece of legislation may be used to prevent information from being published for months and even years. It appears to have been prompted by the worldwide attention paid to the death of Steve Biko in September 1977 and the embarrassment this caused the apartheid regime.
The Police Amendment Bill makes it an offence to publish any 'untrue matter' about the police 'without having reasonable grounds for believing the statement to be true', the burden of proof to be on the accused. Penalties are up to R10,000 fine and/or five years' imprisonment. This innocuous sounding provision will, it is feared, lead to the press being unable to print any account of police actions without clearing it with the police authorities first, as a similar feature of the 1959 Prisons Act has done.
In 1965 the Rand Daily Mail published a series of reports on prison conditions which it had reasonable grounds in the form of sworn statements etc. to believe, and was prosecuted under the Prisons Act. "Four years and some R300,000 in costs later", the paper was convicted. Since then "no paper has published a report about prisons, their administration or the experience in them of prisoners or ex-prisoners except such reports as place the Prisons Department in a favourable light". It is thought that the Police Amendment Bill will have the same censoring effect on reports of police behaviour, particularly towards political detainees.
Other clauses in the Bill allow members of the police force to serve alongside the Defence Force anywhere in the world (rather than only in South Africa) in the event of war or emergency and extend 'the distance between the border of the Republic and a foreign state from one km. to 10 km.' thus enlarging the no-mans land or restricted zone along South Africa's frontiers. These are clearly military rather than police provisions.
