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Jonathan Samkange

Zvamaida Murwira Harare Bureau
Parliament yesterday protected the privacy of cellphone users by outlawing legal provisions empowering the police to approach a mobile service provider to access information that a subscriber would have furnished when registering a sim card.The House also rejected another law compelling a financial institution to inform the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe or the Depositors Protection Board when a person wants to withdraw huge sums of cash.

The nullification followed a concurrence by responsible  government ministries to adverse reports prepared by the Parliamentary Legal Committee against the Statutory Instrument on Postal and Telecommunications (Subscriber Registration) Regulations and the one on Depositors Protection Corporation Regulations that were gazetted last year.

The Senate withdrew the adverse reports on the two Statutory Instruments on Tuesday after its chairperson and Mudzi South MP Jonathan Samkange said their reservations against the two legal instruments had been addressed.

Samkange said his committee found the provisions in those two legal instruments to be unconstitutional as they violated people’s rights.
On the Postal and Telecommunications (Subscriber Registration) Regulations, Samkange said information given to a mobile service provider by a customer was for internal use and could not be accessed by a third party without a court order.

“We said no, that information is actually given for a specific reason,” he said. “It is not to be accessed by a third party and we objected to a police officer, whether in their official capacity or any other, to have access to that information. If the police officers really want the information, they go to court just like any Zimbabwean, make an application before a magistrate or a judge who will then give them a search warrant.”

With the Depositors Protection Corporation Regulations, Samkange said the requirement by a bank to inform a third party when there was a request to withdrawal a huge amount defeated the concept of honouring a claim on demand.