Parliament adopts a revised Protection of State info bill

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 Parliament has adopted the revised Protection of State Information Bill, despite howls of protest from opposition benches.

The highly contentious Bill will now go back to President Jacob Zuma for assent, after 225 MP's voted in favour of the proposed law yesterday, and 88 voted against it.

In September, Zuma referred the bill back to the assembly, citing two sections of the bill he deemed unconstitutional.

It was required to correct a cross-reference in section 42 and a punctuation error in section 45 that in effect rendered meaningless a hard-won safeguard on the state's powers to classify information.

An ad hoc committee then pushed through 30 typographical and grammatical corrections to the bill.

Opposition parties said the Bill remained open to a challenge in the Constitutional Court.