{"id":215645,"date":"2017-12-11T08:26:06","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T06:26:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=215645"},"modified":"2017-12-11T08:26:06","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T06:26:06","slug":"concerns-over-new-state-of-emergency-laws-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/215645\/concerns-over-new-state-of-emergency-laws-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Concerns over new state of emergency laws: report"},"content":{"rendered":"

The presidency is currently in the process of drafting new regulations to deal with a potential state of emergency in the country.<\/p>\n

According to a copy of the proposed laws seen by Rapport<\/a><\/strong>, the regulations – which were first drafted in 2016 – had recently been sent\u00a0to the SA National Defence Force for urgent input.<\/p>\n

The regulations specifically deal with the measures that should be followed should the president decide to declare a state of emergency – including the authority to cut communication channels (including a national internet shutdown) as well as the authority to arrest or detain any person to maintain peace and order within the country.<\/p>\n

Speaking to the Rapport,\u00a0Jacob van Garderen, national director of Lawyers for Human Rights, said that the proposed regulations were similar to those seen under the 1980s apartheid government – especially because of the far-reaching powers they would give to security personnel within the country.<\/p>\n

He said that the reasons for drafting the regulations were also troubling given the context of the Marikana incident as well as past xenophobic attacks in the country.<\/p>\n

Human Rights Commissioner,\u00a0Andr\u00e9 Gaum, said that the regulations would have to be redrafted as they currently infringed on a number of Constitutional rights in their current form.<\/p>\n

The Constitution currently states that\u00a0 the decision to announce a state of emergency can be overturned by the High Court, and can not last longer than three months.<\/p>\n

\n

Read:\u00a0The war for the heart of the NPA is on<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The presidency is currently in the process of drafting new regulations to deal with a potential state of emergency in the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":207079,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-215645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215645"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215671,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215645\/revisions\/215671"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}