Ruling on protecting identity of children
Child victims must be shielded from media, groups claim
THE North Gauteng High Court will hand down judgment today in a landmark case about protecting the identity of child victims and child witnesses from being exposed in the media.
The Centre for Child Law brought the case on behalf of Zephany Nurse, Childline, Nicro and Media Monitoring Africa against Media 24 Limited and 13 others.
Centre for Child Law director Ann Skelton said: “We eagerly await the judgment of the high court and hope that it will take cognisance of the need to protect children’s rights to dignity and privacy as well affirm the need to ensure children are provided with the opportunity to lead lives as contributing members of society without constant and crippling fear that their identities will be revealed.”
On April 21, 2015, the Centre for Child Law obtained an order preventing the media from revealing the real name of Zephany Nurse, who had been kidnapped from the hospital where she was born. In 2015 Nurse was 17 and the media threatened to publish her name when she turned 18.
Skelton explained that the order obtained in terms of Section 154 (3) of the Criminal Procedure Act currently protects children involved in criminal proceedings pending the outcome of the second part of court proceedings. The order obtained protects Nurse’s identity until all appeals on the matter have been concluded.
During the second part of the court proceedings, which was heard in Pretoria on February 9 and 10, the media houses opposing the order against them argued that the protection expires when the child turns 18 years and that section 154 (3) of the Criminal Procedure Act did not apply to the child victims of crime.
The Centre for Child Law argued that the section should provide protection to children until after they turned 18 years of age and that not only child witnesses and offenders be protected by the law, but child victims too.
The law should be deemed unconstitutional, if it cannot be interpreted as a law protecting all children involved in court cases, the Centre for Child Law argued.