Key points law scrapped
The controversial apartheid-era National Key Points Act, which saw government ministers threatening to arrest journalists over publishing photographs of President Jacob Zuma's Nkandla homestead, will be repealed. After years of secrecy and confusion, this week the cabinet announced that the act, passed in 1980, would no longer be law.It will be replaced by the Critical Infrastructure Protection Bill of 2016, due to be published for public comment.According to the law, merely describing a national key point would be a crime, even though a list of which sites were national key points remained a secret.In January last year, a list of all national key points was made public after a Promotion to Access to Information application.There are 204 national key points ranging across the Reserve Bank, SABC, provincial and national legislatures, as well as oil pipelines.The law was often wrongly cited in preventing protest.In 2012, protesting miners were arrested outside the Rustenburg Magistrate's Court under the law.Cabinet spokesman Jeff Radebe said the new bill would make the process of identifying critical infrastructure transparent."It will further ensure that all critical infrastructure is identified and adequately protected," said Radebe."The bill provides for the setting up of an institutional framework to monitor and administer the protection of critical infrastructure."It further defines the functions of the body that will advise the minister of police in the declaration of critical infrastructures," the spokesman said.Right2Know national organiser Murray Hunter said the organisation, which has been campaigning against the National Key Points Act, wasnot in a position yet to comment on the new bill."We don't know yet what will replace it," he said.Hunter said they would scrutinise the bill when it was published for public opinion...
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