The King is also to retain his powers to issue Decrees, but assuming that these would have to be in line with the constitution, at least a framework has been created within which to contain them. The courts have also become bolder in recent years. In 2002 the Appeal Court struck down Royal Decree no. 3, resulting in one of the incidents of confrontation between the judiciary and the state. The draft constitution falls far short of models of best practise and international standards, but it is an improvement in a country where the previous constitution was withdrawn by Royal Decree in 1973, and which has been without one, and no guarantees for human rights, ever since. Media monitoring statistics on Malawi show that there are signs of continuing and festering media freedom problems, and in a broader democratic context, a sign of political stagnation in the country. Journalists in Malawi continue to be beaten, censored, detained, threatened and convicted under anti-media freedom laws. MISA’s statistics also recorded at least one instance where journalists behaved unethically. King Mswati III Over the last two years MISA’s media freedom monitoring reports have highlighted attempts by the state, through the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) and the country’s broadcasting laws, to obstruct private and community radio stations from giving a voice to opposition political parties in the country. This is despite the evidence, and like many other state broadcasters in the region, that the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation provides coverage of the ruling party and government only. In a statement that contradicted every principle of the 1991 Windhoek Declaration on the Promotion of an Independent and Pluralistic African Press, which Malawi adopted along with all other member states in the general conference of Unesco, MACRA Director General Evans Namanja said in June last year: "News is supposed to be for the general public and not a particular community. By broadcasting news, the community radio stations are hijacking the role of public broadcasters, such as the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) and Television Malawi (TVM)". Despite a decrease in reported media freedom violations in Zambia in 2003, the same kinds of media freedom violations as reported over many years by MISA continue to occur. An unusual flurry of exciting media legal reform developments in 2002, however, ground to a halt in 2003. During 2002 three media bills were tabled in Parliament – the result of joint campaigns between MISA-Zambia, PAZA (the Press Association of Zambia that mainly represents state owned journalists and associations), the Association of Senior Journalists and the Zambia Media Women’s Association. These media associations lobb ied opposition MP’s from various parties, who numerically then constituted a combined majority in the Parliament, and succeeded in forcing the Parliament to consider a Freedom of Information bill, a new broadcasting bill and an Independent Broadcasting Authority bill. In a cynical move to ride the wave of public popularity, the government appropriated these bills from the civil society and opposition MP’s that had researched and crafted them, and tabled them in Parliament. Much of their content, however, was culled from the bills prepared by the media civil society and opposition MP’s, although important aspects of the civil society bills were also excised and replaced by content more palatable to the MISA Annual Report (April 2003 – March 2004) 9