The Department of Environmental Affairs has decided to withdraw its proposed changes to South Africa’s weather service legislation after they came to the realisation that they were being silly, but mainly because they were unconstitutional.

After the South African Weather Service Amendment Bill was announced in January this year, weather experts, journalists, and the public immediately joined forces to voice their feelings about how silly some of the proposed amendments were.

The proposed amendments appeared to join the ranks of other pieces of legislation that had been criticised for poor drafting like the Protection of Information Bill.

The bill was going to introduce penalties for issuing weather or air pollution-related information without the weather service’s permission, the supply of information that “detrimentally affects or is likely to detrimentally affect the weather service”, and the supply of false or misleading weather information.

It appears the bill was withdrawn in a parliamentary notice on June 15, but no media or public announcements were made because, let’s be honest, it’s all a little embarrassing for those that thought this was a good idea.

Constitutionally speaking, The FW de Klerk Foundation made a submission to the parliamentary committee on water and environmental affairs in which it called for the scrapping of the penalty-inducing clause, because the constitution guaranteed freedom of expression.

Yesterday, Johan Kruger, director of the FW de Klerk Foundation’s Centre for Constitutional Rights said of the bill’s quiet withdrawal:

We’re rather in the dark [over the bill’s withdrawal] … [and] our bigger concern is the scrutiny, by members of Parliament, of draft law. It does not appear to be what it should be.

National Assembly speaker Max Sisulu in May admitted that as “legislation becomes more sophisticated and highly technical, our parliament and members must become more professional.”

The bill will now go back to the department because it will need to be implemented at some point. However, it will hopefully address aspects such as air quality and climate change reporting mechanisms, and not seek to penalise the average Joe for using something like Twitter to warn people of approaching bad weather.

This is important if South Africa is to “meet its international undertakings on gas emissions linked to the overall rise in global temperatures.”

[Source: BusinessDay]