Enforcing access to information and privacy rights : evaluating proposals for an information protection regulator for South Africa : current developments

Kate Allan Ms, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Iain Currie Mr, Wits University

Abstract

The South African Law Reform Commission has proposed legislation to regulate what is variously referred to in international jurisdictions as 'data protection' and 'information privacy protection'. The Law Commission's own formulation of the basic subject-matter of its proposals is 'protection of personal information'. It has accordingly short-titled its proposed legislation, the Protection of Personal Information Act. If this name sticks and the legislation is enacted, it will in all likelihood, given the South African fondness for clunky acronyms, become known as the POPIA. Personal information (a term of art meaning information, irrespective of the medium in which it appears, that reveals something about someone) is, in the Commission's proposals, to be protected by a complex regime of rights and remedies aimed at regulating its collection and dissemination and the uses to which it may be put. Along the familiar lines of the European model for data-protection regimes, the Commission's proposed legislation centres on a set of 'information protection principles' which flesh out a general and higher-level requirement that personal information must be processed 'in a reasonable manner in order not to infringe the privacy of the data subject'.