R2K and PI joins amaBhungane RICA challenge as amicus curiae
7 August 2018
The Right2Know Campaign and Privacy International, represented by the Legal Resources Centre, have applied to be admitted as friends of the court in an ongoing legal challenge to South Africa’s surveillance law, RICA1, in the High Court in Pretoria.
Our intervention comes on the back of mounting evidence that the South African state’s surveillance powers have been abused, and so-called “checks & balances” in RICA have failed to protect citizens’ constitutional right to privacy.
Among our core arguments are:
- That people have a right to be notified when their communications have been intercepted so that they can take action when they believe their privacy has been unlawfully breached. Currently RICA prevents such notification, unlike equivalent laws in other countries, which require a targeted person to be notified that they had been spied on after an appropriate lapse of time.