Mr Justice Bozalek has ordered counsel back to court on Monday, October 13, to make further submissions in the TV pornography matter which was heard for four days in the Western Cape High Court from August 4 to 7 earlier this year.
The matter before the court is an application by Justice Alliance of South Africa (JASA) (supported by separate applications from Cause for Justice and Doctors for Life) for an order that ICASA re-hear the application by On Digital Media to broadcast 3 pornographic channels on TV. ICASA granted the licence last year; JASA filed its challenge on November 8, 2013 alleging that ICASA failed to apply the correct legal principles.
At the hearing in August it emerged that ICASA were misled by ODM as to the nature of the pornography to be broadcast, says JASA in a media release posted yesterday (Thursday, October 9). ICASA were told the adult channels would show loving couples gazing “adoringly into each other’s eyes” in conventional sexual intercourse. In fact the broadcast schedule included titles such as Backdoor Bikini Milfs and Secret Lives of kept Wives, promoting infidelity and unsafe sex. Advocate Darryl Cooke for JASA contended in court that ICASA “acted under an illusion as to the true content they were authorising.”
Counsel for ODM contended that there are no restrictions against adults watching porn in South Africa and therefore ICASA had no choice but to authorise the channels regardless of their content. He said there was no duty upon them to consider the nature of the content.
JASA and its co-applicants contend that such an interpretation of the law is absurd; if movies shown in a cinema require classification according to content, Parliament could never have intended that there should be no classification process whatever for pornography to be screened in the home living room.
JASA’s founding affidavit, can be found at www.justicealliance.co.za
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Adv Darryl Cooke and Attorneys Norman, Wink & Stephens (Elana Hannington) represent JASA
It should be a matter of common decency and therefore common law that pornography should be banned simply because passions are difficult enough to manage without the added stimulus of watching raw sex by starngers in the living room.