Rodger Bosch/Agence France-Presse â Getty Images  Protesters gathered outside Parliament in Cape Town on Tuesday to denounce the secrecy law.  JOHANNESBURG — Brushing aside protests by press-freedom advocates and heroes of South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, Parliament overwhelmingly passed a contentious bill on Tuesday that will severely restrict the ability of journalists to report any information deemed to be a government secret.  The legislation, which still must undergo further steps to become law, would make it a crime, punishable by lengthy prison terms, to disseminate anything that any state agency regards as classified. Critics have called the legislation a throwback to the apartheid regime’s harsh repression and say it is meant to protect corrupt officials from press scrutiny.  Anger over the legislation was embodied by the presentation of an article published last week in The Mail & Guardian, a major weekly newspaper here, about Mac Maharaj, the spokesman for President Jacob Zuma. Most of the text had been blacked out. This outcome, the paper’s editor said, was what loomed for South Africa’s press if the legislation became law.  The Protection of Information Bill, as the legislation is called, must still clear a national council of provinces before it takes effect. Critics have said they will challenge it in South Africa’s constitutional court.  “The bill in its current form does take us back to pre-1994,” said Elston Sippie, executive director of the country’s Freedom of Expression Institute, referring to the year South Africa became a democracy. “I do think it is a setback in that we fought hard and long to get our bill of rights accepted amongst all South Africans. And it is that bill of rights that is now under threat.”  The onerous implications have some members of the media here feeling under more pressure than at any time since the fall of apartheid.  On both sides of the debate, people have said the battle between the press and the ruling party speaks to the fact that this country, less than two decades after the fall of apartheid, is still figuring out just how to get democracy right.  “Like the United States, it took many, many decades to have your Constitution developed to where it is now,” said Moegsien Williams, the editor of The Star, a daily newspaper based here. “We are now in that kind of process where we’re trying to kind of live up to and entrench the Bill of Rights.”  The news media and civil rights groups had fought unsuccessfully to get the ruling party, the African National Congress, to include an exception in the law that would allow for the revelation of classified information if it were in the public interest.  On Tuesday, protesters urged people to wear black, calling the day “Black Tuesday,” evoking memories of a similarly titled press crackdown in the 1970s under white rule. Demonstrators picketed outside of Parliament in Cape Town and in front of A.N.C. headquarters here.  Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, a Nobel peace laureate and leading figure in the fight to end white-minority domination, said it was “insulting to all South Africans to be asked to stomach legislation that could be used to outlaw whistle-blowing and investigative journalism.”  The office of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first post-apartheid president and emblem of the struggle for democracy, said the legislation was “not yet at a point where it can be said to have met” constitutional standards.  But A.N.C. members stood firm in their support of the legislation, arguing it was repealing a harsher 1982 protection of information law.  “It is our experience that most opponents of this bill have not actually read this bill,” said Luwellyn Tyrone Landers, an A.N.C. parliamentary member. “Today’s events confirm that view.”  The bill will make it a crime punishable by 5 to 25 years in prison for anyone to reveal information that the state labels classified.  Journalists also have expressed concern about a looming proposal by the A.N.C. to create a tribunal that would hear and adjudicate citizen complaints against media outlets over issues of fairness and accuracy.  Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London.
Legislators overwhelmingly approved a new secrecy law that critics say is designed to shield a corrupt elite from press scrutiny.