The Open Democracy Advice Centre (ODAC) and the Goedgedacht Forum for Social Reflection present a dialogue titled “The Protection of Information Bill and its Impact”.

There is fear from many quarters concerning the Protection of Information Bill (hereafter referred to POIB or “the Bill”) and its impact. The fear card can introduce particularly unhelpful elements to a debate that negate common sense.

In choosing the subject for this dialogue, we therefore wanted to get a range of people from different organisations to discuss the issue, to debunk the myths and the hysteria and also to look at issues that have not been covered to date – especially with regard to the implications of the bill for socio-democratic values. The Forum did ask the Portfolio Committee Chairperson and other Parliamentarians to be present at the meeting, but they were unavailable.