Nadine Gordimer has written about the Protection of State Information Bill in The New York Review of Books: The regime of racism in South Africa was maintained not only by brutality—guns, violence, restrictive laws. It was upheld by elaborately extensive...
Read More
From the Mail & Guardian November 25th, 2011 During this week’s Black Tuesday protest outside Parliament, activist Zackie Achmat lowered the South African flag to half-mast. A policeman with a roll of crime-scene tape in his hand stepped forward as...
Read More
Cape Town and London, November 23, 2011 South African PEN and PEN International today expressed alarm over the passage of the Protection of Information bill by the National Assembly, saying that the bill, if enacted into law, represents ‘a retreat...
Read More
I know of no democratic state that does not protect sensitive state secrets. The simple reason being that the breach of whatever protective legislation might be deemed genuinely fit for the purpose would undermine national security. The sale or transferring...
Read More
Anthony Fleischer, President SA PEN One of the evils of apartheid was “information classification” and the State’s efforts to control the flow of news and comment. I recall the Rand Daily Mail‘s resistance to such trends in apartheid days, and...
Read More