28 March 2024

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) notes the National Assembly’s adoption of the General Intelligence Laws Amendment (GILA) Bill.

Intelligence and security services are part of any modern state, what is critical is to ensure there are sufficient checks and balances, transparency and oversight mechanism in place in law to prevent the all too often abuse of such agencies.  South Africa saw the real costs of such shenanigans during the decade of state capture when the State Security Agency and other intelligences organs were wantonly abused for personal, criminal, factional and political purposes.

The Bill is intended to respond to these recent crises and more specifically to the High-Level Panel appointed by the President and led by Dr. Sydney Mufamadi that made clear recommendations on overhauling the existing and clearly weak legislation providing oversight on the security and intelligence services.

There are parts of the Bill that are straight forward, e.g. establishing a National Intelligence Academy and separating domestic and foreign intelligence services and should thus be supported. 

COSATU was deeply worried by several highly offensive clauses that were clearly unconstitutional in the initial draft of the Bill released in 2023.  We are pleased that following objections from the Federation and others, the State Security Agency removed many of these deeply problematic clauses. 

We welcome further amendments and improvements made to the Bill during the Parliamentary hearings, including tightening definitions of threats to national and state security, clauses prohibiting any illegal instructions or acts by members of the security services as well as the separation of the budgets of the Office of the Inspector-General for Intelligence and the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee from that of the State Security Agency.

We remain concerned with two fundamental flaws in the Bill that could lead to unintended consequences and potential abuse:

• Few checks and balances on the bulk monitoring of communications.
• Insufficient measures to address the concerns of the Office of the Inspector-General for Intelligence and the High-Level Panel on the need to enhance and protect its autonomy and oversight powers.

We hope Parliament will address these substantial concerns and produces a final draft of the Bill that ensures the state’s security and intelligence agencies perform their constitutional mandates and are held accountable.

Issued by COSATU

For further comment please contact:

Matthew Parks

Acting National Spokesperson & Parliamentary Coordinator

Cell: 082 785 0687