Thread: Editorial: DAWN
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Old Friday, January 24, 2014
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24.01.2014
Law’s slippery slope


WHEN the Protection of Pakistan Ordinance, 2013 was promulgated last October, it sent a wave of unease and apprehension through the human rights and legal communities. While few would argue that the legal framework for dealing with terrorists and militants does not need a comprehensive overhaul, many would say that security cannot come at the total expense of individual rights and freedoms. The PPO erred in using a hammer where a scalpel would have sufficed — from allowing the designation of an ‘enemy alien’ in dangerously broad terms to allowing for wide-ranging powers of detention and search. Now, compounding the original problems, the government has sanctified indefinite detention under the PPO — a truly extraordinary overreach.

Unsurprisingly, the government has dodged questions about the real intentions and true purpose of the latest legislative move, leaving speculation to fill the gap. Connecting the dots, it would appear the extended detention powers that the government has vested in the security forces are linked to the Supreme Court’s dogged pursuit of missing persons. Unable, or perhaps just plain unwilling, to obey the law and the court on the issue of missing persons, the security establishment, via the political government, may be seeking to buy yet more time for itself while it determines how to extricate itself from the missing persons debacle. If true, that would hardly be shocking — but it does raise an uncomfortable question: why is the government time and again willing to try and come to the rescue of those in the state apparatus involved in grave human rights violations instead of defending the constitutional rights of the public that it was elected to represent?

The misguided approach to strengthening the country’s anti-terror legislation appears to be rooted in two familiar problems: capacity and will. Ensuring justice in securing convictions against terrorists and militants while keeping innocents out of the state’s dragnet is a complex and difficult task. While there are no easy solutions, international experience suggests that there can be some reasonably adequate solutions. It starts with building up the capacity of the state, but it also requires a great deal of intelligence and expertise. The Pakistani approach seems to be the opposite: hasty solutions that rely more on their draconian effect to achieve a measure of success without much thought to collateral or long-term damage. That militancy and terrorism are the greatest threats to internal security that this country has ever known is undeniable. But in trying to fight terror, the state cannot be allowed to unleash a reign of terror of its own. Indefinite detention is near the bottom of a very slippery slope.

ECP without a chief


GIVEN the paralysis that has characterised governance for the last eight months, it is not surprising that the nation’s top election-holding body has been without a head. Retired Justice Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim resigned in July, and since then the PML-N government hasn’t considered it worth its while to give the ECP a new chief in consultation with the opposition. The result is that the ECP has been working under an acting chairman since last summer. This is holding back electoral reforms that could ensure the next general polls are fair, free and transparent. The process for choosing an ECP chief has been institutionalised through the 18th Amendment. Previously, the president nominated the ECP chairman, often arousing the distrust of the opposition. The amendments now make it obligatory for the prime minister to send three names, in consultation with the leader of the opposition, to a parliamentary committee, which will finally make the choice. The reasons for Mr Ebrahim’s resignation following the May 11 polls do not concern us here, but the absence of a permanent chairman has served to handicap the ECP. We are aware, for instance, of the mess created with regard to the LG elections. Prompted by the judiciary to fix the dates for the polls, the ECP announced the schedule and later pleaded for a postponement because it didn’t find itself ready for the task.

Now it is clearly the federal government which has failed to set the process in motion as required under the 18th Amendment. But then the ECP is not the only area where the Nawaz Sharif government has been guilty of inaction. It took its time, for instance, to appoint a defence minister, and the country is still without a proper foreign or commerce minister; and where the government did seem to stir — as in the case of appointments and dismissals of heads of several federal institutions — it appeared motivated by political considerations, inviting a judicial snub. There is no doubt the sudden rise in acts of terror has added to the chaos in governance, but finding an ECP chief in consultation with the opposition should not be such a time-consuming job.

Popular outrage


THE mourners are back on the streets. There is a sense of déjà vu as we look at the moving pictures of men, women and children sitting with the remains of their loved ones in the biting cold of Quetta, waiting for justice. We saw these images before a little over a year ago, when the heirs of the Alamdar Road bombings began a protest sit-in that was replicated nationwide. That protest may have brought down the incompetent government that ruled Balochistan at the time, but for the province’s Hazara Shias and for other citizens who have been victims of terrorism, little has changed. Sectarian and jihadi militants still operate with impunity as indicated by the attack on pilgrims returning from Iran on Tuesday in Mastung, which triggered the latest protests. Meanwhile, the federal government continues to show little by way of leadership or resolve, much like the previous dispensation. Expectedly, protests have spread to other cities, with main arteries blocked in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and other locations. This has resulted in traffic gridlock and business closures; yet how else can peaceful citizens express their outrage at the government’s inability or unwillingness to tackle terrorism? Regrettable as the inconvenience to citizens is, there is apparently no other way to grab the government’s attention.

To his credit, the Balochistan chief minister did visit the protesters on Wednesday. Yet to meet the protesters’ demands — which are also the demands of many Pakistanis — of punishing the perpetrators of Tuesday’s outrage and uprooting terrorism, it is the federal government and security establishment that will need to take meaningful action. As we’ve said before, the fight must be taken to the militants. If the state fails to take solid action, such displays of public disaffection will only intensify. The people have buried too many loved ones mowed down by terrorists.
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