Last week witnessed a very interesting incident at the University of Oxford, just outside of London when freedom of speech in England was tested by speeches delivered by leaders from the country's right-wing party and a person once detained in Austria for writing a book that denied the holocaust.

In a country that has no constitution but a firm law regulating the behaviour of the media, the speakers did not fall out with the government. On the contrary, in addition to their personal body guards, English police rumbled to defend them from angry demonstrators marching with the slogan, "Unite to Stop the Fascist BNP [British National Party]".

Oxford has a history of being considered the "last bastion of free speech in the Western World", as The Economist quoted Harold Macmillan. The University, for example, is responsible for this statement: Controversial, "This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country."

This statement is especially bold considering that it was said in 1933 when nationalistic fervour was high in Europe and individuals were subjected to certain sacred national agendas. That was before Second World War, long before regimes such as Nazism and Fascism exposed their ugly faces to the world. Today, these ideologies are outcast, unpopular, and have little place in political spaces anywhere in the world. But there are huge numbers of people in many countries who believe and promote the superiority of a certain race - breading hate, confrontation and conflict in societies.

Yet, the reaction from societies and countries across the world has been mixed: there are those who prohibit public expressions of these views, but there also those who believe the wisest way to fight hate speech is with more speech.

"Free speech is like a muscle which needs to be exercised to remain useful; the extremes of its terrain must be staked out to stop it shrinking," The Economist quotes those who defended the decision by Oxford to invite the leaders of the rightwing party and an apologist of the Nazis to speak their mind in public.

This strategy - known as invite and insult approach - was used by Columbia University in New York when it invited Iran's combative President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The list of countries in this category, however, is rather short. Many rather chose to limit the horizon of free speech with the pretext of protecting common good, restoring public order or avoiding incitement of religious and ethnic tension; though of course their most favourite excuse for curtailing freedom is to maintain national security and protect national interests.

Ethiopia's society is no different, except that it has a government that won notoriety for locking up large numbers of media practitioners over the past decade and half. The press law that was enacted in the early 1990s - draconian for its antagonists but with important legislative milestones of enshrining freedom of the press and banning censorship - was instrumental in the state's passion to send many of the journalists to jail. Clearly, it did not work, for what the state did has given this country a negative international image.

When the EPRDF-government finally went public with its desire to rewrite this piece of legislation five years ago, it had convincing reasons: the Press Law came into being before the current constitution was ratified in December 1994. Its applications, together with the Imperial Penal Code that was only revised recently, has brought with it a conflict of values of two different eras. For instance, there was no need during the Emperor's time to protect citizens' right to speak to power for they were his subjects. This was efficiently encoded in the old Penal Code, while the Press Law tried to espouse the ideals of freedom to speak and the right to expose and criticize the powers that be. Understandably, there was a need to reconcile the two.

When the first attempt to share the administration's desire to rewrite the law was made public, there was deafening uproar, though for good reasons. The media industry was alarmed by what the press bill had in its pages, but also by the motive for which the bill was written.

The bill has tentacles reaching into every aspect of media, far beyond the right to gather and report information. If passed, the press would be constrained at every step, from licensing to production of newspapers, and from distribution to vendors to soliciting advertising. Such was the scope of the law that an early version claimed the publishing of an embassy press statement would be considered as advertising, and that newspapers should copies of their advertising contracts entered with foreign companies.

Media houses would also be burdened by an obligation to ask advertisers for their licences and to check whether the advertisers are licensed to conduct the business they promote in ads. Local media houses would also be banned from obtaining financial support from any foreign sources, with the sole exception of funding training, though prior consent of the government would still be required in this case. 

An early version of the law mandated the creation and regulation of a press council, an entity usually left to the industry to run.

The bill's chapter on access to information suffered from a major conceptual deficit in making a distinction between information classified as espionage and confidential.

The press bill provoked intense debate televised nationally and gripped the attention of the nation at the time. Credit goes to the authorities, who showed their courage in allowing the debates on media law to be broadcasted, thus showing that they were not afraid of the battle of ideas.

So much seems to have changed since then. Of course, the aftermath and the subsequent impact of the electoral debacle of May 2005 is a threshold here. The bill - only God and the authors know how many versions there were to it - never made it even to the Council of Ministers, a body that approves bills before they are sent to Parliamentary standing committees.

Indeed, there were efforts in the meantime. Parliament has hired consultants from four countries - Canada, United Kingdom, Germany and India - to review their respective countries' press laws, a result of which is a fat document financed by the United States government that included recommendations for Ethiopia to emulate. This was followed by a subsequent comparative analysis conducted by Toby Mandel, an expert from Article 19, of the experiences of these countries in regulating the media industry and Ethiopia's revised press law so that the latter is consistent to an international best practice.

Certainly, there was so much back and forth and compromises to stick to some of the provisions and drop others. Nonetheless, the final version the administration wants to pass through Parliament was distributed to opposition lawmakers (although sadly excluded few of them) for negotiations to reach into consensus and subsequently to media practitioners for consultations. The latter group, assisted by Pact Ethiopia, has initiated a promising effort - a media forum - a year ago, whose task included to an industry voice in reaction to the bill that has been tabled few weeks back.

This forum has created a joint secretariat with the government, through the Ministry of Information, and discussions are undertaken in rather good faith. To be fair, the administration has demonstrated responsiveness and its desire to work both with its political rivals and the industry over the revised press bill, an approach far different from the bulling behaviour it is otherwise known for. Not only has it shown its interest to engage the media over the legislative process, but also promised to involve it in deciding when, where and how the discussions will be held. It is a positive move that needs a response in kind from the industry. Whether these promises will be delivered and how much the industry is prepared to the challenge and goes beyond its usual rhetoric is yet to be seen.

Nevertheless, the revised press bill - with six chapters and 49 articles in 43 pages - is a far different animal than its predecessors; and for the better. The authors should be applauded for their responsiveness to the media outcries few years back and for cleaning their bill of all the bottlenecks in registrations, productions, distributions and advertising. They need to be recognized for their consistencies in resisting the temptations of controlling the making and the function of the press council, a self-regulatory body that should solely be left to the industry.

Indeed, the press bill that is currently tabled for discussion is not without concern, although it too has several provisions in favour of the media industry. Its major shortfalls start at the first page, where it has a preamble that also justifies on what conditions the media's freedom should be curtailed. Understandably, the constitution (Article 29 Sub-article Six) allows restrictions on freedom of speech only on two conditions: to protect the wellbeing of minors, human dignity and individuals' reputations, as well as to prevent incitement to war.

The bill, in its third paragraph of the preamble, has been kept vague in that it justifies restriction in order to protect "superior other rights". If at all there should be a superior right in a list of rights, the freedom of expression ought to be placed among the first. This too is wrong.

There could indeed be mundane issues to be discussed when (not if) the authors of the bill and media practitioners meet; hopefully it will be soon. Nonetheless, the bill has to make a major departure when it comes to its largest component - the right to access information in its third chapter.

This section of the proposed law is better known as a freedom of information act, legislation designed to force the government reveal the information they have kept in their vaults, with the exception of certain kinds of information, such as those crucial to national security, which may remain guarded as state secret for a certain number of years.

True, journalists use these legislative instruments perhaps more frequently and better than anybody else. However, these are laws meant to be used by any member of the public, thus should be dealt with separately from the press law.

There are voices that argue that this administration played games in the legislative process of the press law. They have a point. Many of the draconian provisions put in earlier versions of the press bill were incorporated in the penal code revised three years ago (Article 607 to 619); they are all meant to protect individuals from crimes against their dignity and character. Unfortunately, the spirit of these provisions strays quite far from the Biblical axiom that "The Truth Shall Sets you Free." The penal code disagrees. It instead places a burden of proof on the defendant to show innocent motive, even if what has been said is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.