{"id":320155,"date":"2019-09-16T11:55:50","date_gmt":"2019-09-16T09:55:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=320155"},"modified":"2019-09-16T13:58:52","modified_gmt":"2019-09-16T11:58:52","slug":"rica-declared-inconsistent-with-the-constitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/cellular\/320155-rica-declared-inconsistent-with-the-constitution.html","title":{"rendered":"RICA declared &#8220;inconsistent&#8221; with the Constitution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The South Gauteng High Court has found that parts of the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information (RICA) Act are unconstitutional.<\/p>\n<p>In April 2017, media group amaBhungane filed an application in the High Court challenging the constitutionality of the act.<\/p>\n<p>This, after it emerged that journalist Sam Sole\u2019s communications were intercepted while he was reporting on the corruption investigation against former president Jacob Zuma.<\/p>\n<p>In a decision handed down by judge Roland Sutherland on Monday (16 September), the court found that the law was inconsistent with the constitution on a number of points including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The act fails to adequately prescribe the procedure for notifying a person whose information has been intercepted;<\/li>\n<li>The act fails to adequately prescribe the proper procedures to be followed when state officials are examining, copying, sharing and sorting through data obtained through interceptions;<\/li>\n<li>The act fails to adequately address situations where the subject of surveillance is either a practising lawyer or a journalist.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To remedy these issues, the judgement adds a number of new sections to the RICA Act.<\/p>\n<p>It also suspended the invalidity of the act for two years to allow for parliament to bring the legislation in line with the constitution.<\/p>\n<p>Civil society group Right2Know said the judgement means that bulk surveillance activities are now unlawful and invalid in South Africa.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe congratulate amaBhungane and the legal team and we are happy that this will bring an end to surveillance abuses,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n<p><em>Source: <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/technology\/341219\/high-court-finds-that-south-africas-surveillance-act-rica-is-inconsistent-with-the-constitution\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">BusinessTech<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<h3 class=\"my-4\">Now read: <a href=\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/cellular\/319955-cell-c-suffers-massive-downtime.html\" rel=\"bookmark\">Cell C suffers WhatsApp downtime<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The South Gauteng High Court has found that parts of the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information (RICA) Act are unconstitutional.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341006,"featured_media":275387,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[35,907,1043,60927],"class_list":["post-320155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cellular","tag-headline","tag-rica","tag-sim","tag-unsconstitutional"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320155"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341006"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}