were to be regarded as merely a severe limitation of the right, it would still be unconstitutional. In S v Manamela and Another (Director General of Justice intervening) 2000 (5) BCLR 491 (CC), a decision of the South African Constitutional Court, O’REGAN J said at para 53: “The level of justification required to warrant a limitation upon a right depends on the extent of the limitation. The more invasive the infringement, the more powerful the justification must be.” This is undoubtedly the correct approach. Thus, in DARE, Chiweshe ought not to have upheld a blanket ban in the absence of serious evidence that could properly satisfy the “reasonable grounds” requirement. (Of course if – as has been argued above – the ban was a negation rather than a limitation, then even the production of such serious evidence would not suffice to save the constitutionality of the ban). To ban a demonstration simply on the basis of an unsupported assertion that violence will occur if it takes place would inevitably lead to abuse. The state would always be able to ban demonstrations without being under any real pressure from the courts to justify the ban. In a modern constitutional state courts must subject bans on demonstrations – particularly blanket bans on demonstrations – to intensive scrutiny. As Woolman (2013:389) notes, courts must “require the state to demonstrate that no other means of dealing with a threat of public order … is available.” The judge accepts that the provision allows the regulating authority to impose a blanket ban on all demonstrations and its effect is to impose greater restrictions than are necessary to achieve its purpose. Nonetheless, he decides the effect is limited because the ban is of limited duration and applied to a restricted geographical area. On the issue of whether there were less restrictive measures means of achieving the purpose of the limitation, the judge first makes the unhelpful remark that “the enabling legislation does not give the regulating authority options other than those provided for under s 27.” He then goes on to point out that the authority is limited because the authority can only impose the ban where it has reasonable grounds for doing so. He implies that the authority had reasonable grounds for imposing the blanket ban because on two previous occasions that had been violence leading to destruction of property and the authority feared that such violence would recur unless demonstrations were disallowed to allow for a “period of healing”. Thus every time some violence occurs even though the organisers of the public demonstration had planned only a peaceful demonstration, the police would be entitled to impose a ban on all demonstrations in a whole district for up to thirty days. Additionally, this is clearly a case where the courts ought to have stepped in to prevent the state from exploiting the provisions of the Public Order and Security Act in order to suppress demonstrations which it disapproves – contrary to the Constitution. A more generous interpretation of “peaceful” should be applied to uphold the right to demonstrate when the organisers have organised a peaceful demonstration and most of the demonstrators remain peaceful but a few members of the assembly engage in violence. Such an approach finds support in The Bill of Rights Handbook Iain Currie & Johan De Waal2, where the learned authors state that: “A generous interpretation of the ‘peaceful’ proviso is necessary to prevent the state from exploiting this requirement in order to suppress unpopular positions. This 2 Currie & de Waal, op cit note 3 at 384