Fact-Checking Touria Prayag
08.02.2022
Journalist Touria Prayag was on Radio Plus a while ago (on 28 January) attacking the MSM’s repression. This is a worthy cause. In particular, she criticized the repression of the Public Gathering Act (PGA). The PGA is indeed a repressive law.
However, she misquotes from the PGA and attacks an invented “clause” that – thank goodness – is not in the PGA.
In LALIT, we know what is in the PGA, because we fought for the total repeal of the Public Order Act (1970), its predecessor. The POA was replaced in 1991 by the generally less repressive, but nevertheless still repressive, PGA. We also know what is in the PGA because we have had perhaps a dozen fights with police officers over its interpretation, and charges and Court Cases implicating our members under the PGA.
Anyway, Touria Prayag speaks in public over the radio, popularizing a false quote from the PGA. She thus contributes inadvertently to making people, in effect, submit to more repression than the law imposes. She causes any listeners, who may believe her, to submit to a level of repression that she invents, and which she thinks is in the PGA, when it is not. Getting people to submit to a level of repression that does not exist means causing more repression than there already is, instead of opposing repression. And she is doing so, it seems, by mistake. It means she is opening the possibility for more repression by her own ignorance.
Journalists cannot afford to make this kind of mistake.
This is extremely dangerous. MSM’s repression is bad enough without journalists making people submit to worse repression by causing them to bow down to an invented quotation from the PGA. What is troubling is that it is the very same invented quotation that police officers are always touting erroneously to be in the PGA, when it is not.
Journalists should not fall for this.
We know that, in their profession, those journalists who report on police and legal matters – this is not the case for Touria Prayag – often end up relying on an unsavory “donan-donan” relationship with police officers but even they ought not to fall for policemen’s false quotations from the Statute Book. Journalists can read. Get your law book out, and read it, for goodness sake. Google the PGA and read Section 3 and 4.
We say “journalists” in the plural because Nawaaz Noorbux and Jugdish Joypaul were present. They were unable to correct Ms. Prayag’s erroneous quote from the PGA, and just added their bit, reinforcing her error.
We are aware that, while the Press in many countries has begun to employ fact-checkers, in Mauritius the Press bosses cannot apparently afford to. No, they are too skint. Radio journalists really do need a fact checker in these times, and they need one on the spot to inform them via their earphones that an erroneous fact has been emitted over the air, and this allows them to correct it in real time. The truth and the facts, in times of industrially produced “fake news” and “big lies”, should matter to journalists more than ever. In fact, the most valuable, and very first employees to be taken on and last to be fired, in any Press business today, ought indeed to be the fact checkers.
Anyway, it was a painful radio program to listen to. (Just Google “Radio Plus Touria Prayag” and it comes up.) All three journalists just went on and on with a mistaken quote from the PGA, spreading the fake news that anyone organizing a public gathering has to “get permission” from the police. This is just not true. You don’t have to. You have to inform them.
We have spent decades fighting the police officers who spread this rumour that you have to “get permission”. Police officers like to see themselves as “giving permission”. They get furious every time we inform them that people only have to “notify” them, and that they do not need to seek or to get permission.
Every time we fight on this issue, whether with individual police officers or against the Police Commissioner before the Supreme Court or Intermediate Court or District Court, we win. We win simply because the law is clear. They, and journalists, please, please, please, just look up the law and read it!
An organizer of a public gathering does not have to or “ask permission” or “request permission” or “seek permission” or “get permission” or “be accorded permission” or to bow down in any way in order to hold any demonstration or any other gathering. It is a constitutional right to do so.
The PGA, and this is repressive enough in all conscience, says and we quote from Section 3, the relevant section, “Any person wishing to hold or organise a public meeting or a public procession shall give written notice to the Commissioner not less than 7 clear days before the day the meeting or procession is to be held or organised” (the bold is ours). Giving written notice is not the same as asking for permission. Any child of seven years old can make this kind of distinction when their parents say, “You need my permission,” or “Leave a message to notify me where you are”. Informing the Police Commissioner is just not the same as begging for permission and then waiting around for this permission to be granted.
In fact, the minute you have informed the Commissioner, you can, legally speaking, go ahead and advertise your gathering.
The Police Commissioner then has 48 hours (two days) in which to object or impose other conditions if he intends to and has valid reason to. If he stays silent, you just go ahead. You do not have to wait for any “permission” – however much police officers have brainwashed anyone – meaning journalists and others – into thinking so.
So, in the case of any demonstration that is planned from long before, as many are, one simply informs the Police Commissioner in writing, and he then has 48 hours to object. If he does not, that’s it. One goes ahead.
LALIT members have, in the past, when not satisfied with a decision of the Commissioner who has within this 48-hour period objected, gone before the Supreme Court, as the PGA allows, and won our case. We argued that the reasons the Police Commissioner gave for not allowing the march did not stand up to the test of his “reasonably” believing the gathering might cause disorder, as the PGA says they must. His decision has to be “reasonable”. That was for a demonstration we planned in front of the US Embassy at the time of the AGOA summit in Mauritius. The Police Commissioner argued practical security issues – not having enough staff to watch both the AGOA summit and the US Embassy – and the Supreme Court Judge rightly statuted that this kind of bureaucratic reasoning does not hold water relative to people’s Constitutional right to hold a public gathering.
Journalists should know about this kind of thing.
And journalists should also know that before the PGA, there was a generally even more repressive law, the Public Order Act(POA), under which inter alia there were compulsory prison sentences. And journalists need to be aware that the Public Order Act, taken together with the Industrial Relations Act, were used as repressive laws that could replace the total State of Emergency, which was worse still. This entire legal framework was constructed by the Labour Party – in alliance with the PMSD. So, when the MSM-MMM government in 1991 passed the PGA, it was not imposing repression so much as not lifting it enough. For which we in LALIT criticized both parties at the time, and we still criticize them for it. The PGA needs important amendments.
So, the powers of the Police, as regards public gatherings, are draconian. In LALIT, we denounce this. But, draconian as they are, you do not have to “ask their permission” to hold one. You just inform the Commissioner. He then has 48 hours, a limited time in which to respond and to ban a gathering, or to impose conditions, all of which must be reasonable. For exercising this power, he has to remember that he has a political price to pay.
And spontaneous demonstrations are a different kettle of fish, anyway.
For example, during the whole of the August 1979 general strike movement and the whole of the September 1980 mass movement, because the working class was mobilized, the Public Order Act – more draconian than the PGA – was of no use to the Police or the Government. No demonstrations – and there were hundreds – led to arrests or prosecutions. Demonstrations were held in the cities and villages, in the day and in the night, by women and men, and there were, to our knowledge, neither arrests nor prosecutions for any of these “illegal” gatherings. There were dozens of arrests and prosecutions for other offenses during the two mass movements, but not for gatherings without informing the Police.
Journalists need to know this, too. That the balance of class forces can make laws unenforceable. And, it took years of forums, petitions, talks, meetings and demonstrations to get the POA and the IRA revoked.
So, all this to say that we need to mobilize against repressive laws, including the PGA. But not on a false basis. And we need to do so, with an understanding of the laws, and of the flow of Mauritian history that they are part of.
LALIT, 8 February 2022.
