The Regulation of Gatherings Act (RGA) places strict guidelines on how to exercise the right to protest, with particular emphasis on the submission of a notice of gathering to the responsible person within a municipality in terms of sections 2(4) and 3 of the Act. However, municipalities do not proactively make the notice of gathering templates available for public use (or may not have these at all), and often do not publicise the details of the designated responsible person. To test municipalities’ compliance with the RGA, the Legal Resources Centre (LRC) enlisted the help of the South African History Archive (SAHA) to submit a series of Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) requests to every municipality in South Africa. PAIA requests were also submitted to the South African Police Service (SAPS) for records relating to public order policing. The initiative aimed to provide these templates and related documents to interested parties as an open source resource on the protestinfo.org.za website. The results of these efforts show that compliance with the RGA is uneven. This article explores the flaws in the regulatory environment that have led to this level of apathy within government, despite the crucial role of the right to protest and the right of access to information as enabling rights in our constitutional democracy. An analysis of the full PAIA request dataset shows the extent of government’s resistance to facilitating these enabling rights, and provides insights into remedial interventions. The article concludes with a series of recommendations, which centre on statutory reforms to the RGA and PAIA to ensure appropriate sanction for noncompliance by government, proactive disclosure of relevant information, and emergency provisions allowing curtailed procedural requirements. The intention of the proposed amendments is to minimise the possibility that these fundamental, enabling rights might be frustrated.

中文翻译：

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促进推动者：利用信息访问权确保和平抗议权

集会法（RGA）对如何行使抗议权提出了严格的指导原则，特别强调了根据市政法规第2（4）和3条向市政当局内的负责人提交集会通知。法案。但是，市政当局不会主动将收集模板的通知提供给公众使用（或可能根本没有这些通知），并且通常不会公开指定负责人的详细信息。为了测试市政当局对RGA的遵守情况，法律资源中心（LRC）寻求南非历史档案馆（SAHA）的帮助，向南非的每个市政当局提交了一系列《促进信息获取法案》（PAIA）的要求。PAIA的请求也已提交给南非警察局（SAPS），以获取与公共秩序警务有关的记录。该计划旨在将这些模板和相关文档作为有关抗议者网站上的开源资源提供给感兴趣的各方。这些努力的结果表明，对RGA的遵守不平衡。本文探讨了监管环境中的缺陷，这些缺陷导致了政府内部的这种冷漠，尽管抗议权和信息获取权在我们的宪法民主制中起着至关重要的作用。对完整的PAIA请求数据集的分析显示了政府对促进这些授权权利的抵制程度，并提供了对补救措施的见解。本文最后提出了一系列建议，它以对RGA和PAIA的法定改革为中心，以确保对政府的不遵守行为进行适当的制裁，主动披露相关信息，以及允许减少程序要求的紧急规定。拟议修正案的目的是最大程度地降低这些基本的授权权利可能受到挫败的可能性。