Bid to scrap declassified info database

The Nelson Mandela Foundation centre of memory head says there is no need for a neutral database where declassified information is stored and made available to the public.

Verne Harris told the parliamentary committee on the Protection of Information Bill yesterday the National Archives had been "uncomfortable" about holding apartheid State Security Council papers. Keeping a proposed "national declassification database" at the archives may not be a good idea.

Harris has been asked to write by next week a proposal doing away with the national declassification database. He said freedom of information "only flourishes in an environment where there is mutual agreement on what constitutes a legitimate secret".

Under the Promotion of Access to Information Act, some information was kept secret and people needed to have legitimate reasons to request information such as the protection of a right. A company could refuse to disclose confidential or secret information if it concerned a third party.

Harris said that in his experience at the South African History Archives, the Department of Defence was always willing to share information.

The info bill says all classified information older than 20 years should be automatically declassified unless a compelling case is made to keep it secret.

Harris said this would make his work easier as Mandela's prison files were still classified after more than 20 years. To declassify them would take up to nine months.

But DA MP David Maynier said it would be unwise to do away with the national declassification database and leave information in the hands of the security services. In other countries highly sensitive information had been reviewed by independent bodies, Maynier said.

"The really hard cases are informer files from the [apartheid] Bureau for State Security," said Maynier. This was so as the ANC might use the declassified information to settle old scores.

But Harris said that if informer files were declassified, they would not necessarily be released to the public as the act could still be used to keep the names of informers secret to protect their privacy.

When he worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he saw "thousands of military intelligence files" that had been in the hands of the security establishment since 1994.

Opposition MPs were shocked to find in the latest version of the bill that spying was expanded to criminalise anyone who gave classified information to "any person acting on behalf of any faction, party, bureau, department, agency or military force . or foreign company".

The committee agreed last week there would be spying charges only if people gave classified information to foreign states.