Govt to amend Suppression of Terrorism Act

MBABANE – Government has made an undertaking to amend the 2008 Suppression of Terrorism Act (STA), which is seen as having excessively restrictive measures.

The promise was made at the recently-concluded 102nd International Labour Organisation (ILO) Congress in Geneva, Switzerland.
A report of the Committee on the Application of Standards has now been released and it contains all that was submitted by government, workers and employers’ federations during the congress.
Minister of Labour and Social Security Lutfo Dlamini represented government at the annual conference.

The report states, in part: “The government had also agreed to amend the Suppression of Terrorism Act, especially the definition of ‘terrorist’ and, in this respect, the Attorney General was working with line ministries and international agencies concerned.”
Many international agencies, especially Amnesty International and the International Bar Association, have continuously complained that the term terrorist, as defined in the STA, was ‘overbroad’.

These agencies, in a 2009 report, said the STA was incompatible with Swaziland’s international and regional human rights obligations because of its failure to restrict the definition of ‘terrorist act’ to the threatened or actual use of violence against civilians, as well as to restrict it to acts taken in pursuit of an underlying political or ideological goal, a failure which affects most of the other provisions of the law as they depend on the definition.

They also said the definition of a ‘terrorist act’ failed to meet the requirements of legality, that is, accessibility, precision, applicability to counter-terrorism alone, non-discrimination and non-retroactivity.

Moreover, they argued that in the STA “the offences are defined with such over-breadth and imprecision that they place excessive restrictions on a wide range of human rights - such as freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of association and freedom of assembly - without adhering to the requirements of demonstrable proportionality and necessity”. 

The STA is the instrument that Prime Minister Sibusiso Barnabas Dlamini used on November 14, 2008, to ban four organisations: the People’s United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO), Swaziland Youth Congress (SWAYOCO), South African-based Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN), and Swaziland People’s Liberation Army (Umbane), which he declared to be terrorist entities.

PUDEMO President Mario Masuku was also charged under the same law in 2008 after making certain utterances at the funeral of Musa MJ Dlamini, who died in the Lozitha Bridge bombing incident.

South African national Amos Mbedzi is currently serving life imprisonment after being convicted for offences under this Act.
Last week Wednesday, the High Court sentenced political activist Thandaza Silolo to 65 years imprisonment for committing offences under the same Act.

Besides amending the STA, government also undertook to do the same with the 1963 Public Order Act and 1973 King’s Proclamation.

“The government had made a decision to amend the Public Order Act of 1963 and to adopt the proposed Code of Good Practice. The government thanked the ILO and the social partners for developing a code/guideline to regulate the relationship between parties during protest action, demonstrations and other industrial action, as an interim measure, while the Public Order Act was being amended,” further reads the ILO report.

In its conclusion, the ILO wrote: “The committee also noted the government’s statement that all pending legislative issues would be attended to within the framework of the relevant tripartite institutions as a matter of urgency, including the recommendations made by the ILO consultancy in relation to the 1973 King’s Proclamation.”
 

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