That’s quite a compliment. Thank you 🙂 I apologise for the tone I adopted in my previous comment.

I agree completely that the right to freedom of expression must be protected. But so too must the duties of citizens be enforced, so that citizens do not infringe on the rights of others. The constitution recognises and enshrines this balance, and requires government to pass laws to ensure this balance.

Thus the right to freedom of expression is limited by the explicit exclusions of hate speech and incitement in section 16(2), but also by the rights to dignity and good name (the constitutional basis of defamation).

Your personal freedom of expression is also limited by the law of contract and any contracts into which you enter voluntarily that restrict your freedom. In fact simply working for someone places upon you a duty of good faith which restricts your right to speech insofar as you cannot in good faith tell the public or competitors about certain aspects or plans of the business.

The right to security also restricts your freedom of expression, in particular where it comes to issues deemed to be in the interest of national security (that is, the security of the country, its people and its economy), where you can be forced to keep information secret.

If you’re going to define censorship as any rule that restricts what can possibly be put into words, then yes, De Lille is calling for censorship. But then the constitution also requires censorship — of hate speech, or defamatory statements, etc. Is this really censorship?

Censorship is more commonly understood as a restriction placed on free speech; but free speech is a subset of all speech. Free speech is protected speech, and excludes those things – like hate speech – that are unprotected. In this context De Lille did not directly call for censorship. In fact her concern was directed at the fact that a blogger allegedly engaging in unprotected speech could not be identified.

Please don’t mistake what I said about limitation of anonymity for a requirement to identify yourself. If you write a letter to the editor of a newspaper (for publication on a letters page) you can remain anonymous by using a pseudonym, but the newspaper will not publish the letter unless you provide your real identity. That way if the newspaper is served a subpoena they can provide your details to the court, and you can be held accountable for your words.

This is a duty imposed on all persons, natural and juristic, by our constitution. Section 32 provides for access to information, and that any person may be called upon to surrender information that is required by another person to protect their rights.

If the government is to succeed in its duty to protect rights, it has to be able to enforce duties. The right to life is paired with the duty not to kill. The right to freedom of expression is paired with the duty not to incite violence. In order to enforce or police those duties the government uses Section 36 of the constitution to ensure that you can be held accountable for your actions.

If we are to ensure that people are being faithful to their duty not to incite violence, or spread hatred of arbitrary groups, or deframe, then their must be a mechanism for those people to be identified after the fact. The alternative is to force everyone to have their speech approved before the fact.

The former is a restriction of anonymity that ensures that you cannot hide from the *judiciary* (but you can otherwise remain anonymous). The latter is censorship.