Interdicting The Media – A Losing Strategy

When faced with the prospect of being implicated in a story by an investigative journalist, many influential business people instruct their lawyers to urgently apply to court to prevent the publication of the story. Generally such applications for an interdict are ill-advised, because our courts approach attempts to restrain publication with caution.

When dealing with an application to suppress publication, our courts weigh up the right to freedom of expression entrenched in section 16 of our Constitution (which includes freedom of the press and freedom to receive or impart information and ideas) with the rights of human dignity and privacy entrenched in sections 10 and 14 of the Constitution. The cases of Mandela v Falati 1995 (1) SA 251 (W) and Hix Networking Technologies v System Publishers (Pty) Limited and Another 1997 (1) SA 391 (A) illustrate that our courts generally steer a course "as close to the preservation of the freedom of expression" as possible.