Malawi President Bingu wa Mutharika has signed a bill into law that will make it possible for the country’s information minister to ban the publication and circulation of any publication deemed “contrary to the public interest,” sources in Malawi told IPI this week.

News reports said that the amendment of Section 46 of the Penal Code was one of several bills the president signed into law this week.

A report in the Daily Times quotes the law as saying that “if the minister has reasonable grounds to believe that the publication or importation of any publication would be contrary to the public interest, he may, by order published in the Gazette, prohibit the publication or importation of such publication.”

The previous version of the law dates from the era of one-party rule in Malawi, IPI was told by an editor of a prominent Malawian publication who did not want to be named. Under the old law, the information minister could ban local publications without giving any reason, and foreign publications that were deemed “seditious,” the source said. However, with the arrival of multi-party democracy in 1994, the law was considered repressive and fell out of use.

With the amendment, the minister must now show “reasonable grounds” for banning publications. “This would be an improvement in a dictatorship but not a democracy,” the editor said. In a democracy, he said, such a law is “undesirable and oppressive,” adding that the whole law should have been taken off the books.

“We are deeply concerned that the amendment of this antiquated and repressive law could mean that the Malawi authorities now intend to censor the local press,” said IPI Acting Director Alison Bethel McKenzie. “The authorities should stop attempting to control the press through repressive legislation and threats.”

In August 2010, President Wa Mutharika threatened to close down newspapers that “tarnish” his government’s image. IPI was alarmed at this threat, not least because it came in connection with a news article that merely cited statistics from a report by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), an economic organization of southern African states, which said over a million Malawians will need food aid following a drought.

In November, the Weekly Times, which is owned by Blantyre Newspapers Ltd, was banned on the basis that it had failed to register with the national archives. The newspaper group managed to receive a court injunction on the ban, which allows the Weekly Times to continue publishing.