Rights group calls for withdrawal of Punjab ‘habitual offenders’ bill, calls it ‘regressive’

Islamabad, July 10 (IANS) Several civil society activists, lawyers and journalists in Pakistan have called for withdrawal of Punjab’s ‘habitual offenders’ bill, terming it “regressive” and warning that if passed into law, the bill would have a corrosive impact on the protection of human rights in the country.

Addressing a panel discussion organized by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), human rights lawyer Asad Jamal said the main aim of the bill was to allow the state to legally trample on civil liberties by using vague terms such as “habitual offender” and “anti-social behavior”.

“He also expressed concerns over Article 5 of the bill, under which the provincial government could arbitrarily and unaccountably authorize an intelligence committee to register cases against a ‘habitual offender,'” the HRCP said.

Academic Adnan Sattar noted that the bill had taken “repressive legality” to the extreme, while calling on civil society to take a more pragmatic approach in campaigning against these “regressive laws”.

Moreover, HRCP Punjab Vice President Raja Ashraf observed that the space for debate in Pakistan’s legislative bodies had shrunk.

Pakistani lawyer Ali Javed Darugar warned that the bill was in fact an improvement on colonial laws and argued that “decentralization and state accountability were the only way to escape what had become a vicious circle.”

Imran Khan-led Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) lawmaker Sheikh Imtiaz argued that the bill contravened at least 14 articles of the Pakistani Constitution, including the right to a fair trial and the right to freedom of movement. He also claimed that “lawmakers were often denied access to the contents of bills before they were brought up for discussion.”

Last month, the HRCP expressed deep concern over the persistence of extrajudicial killings in Pakistan’s Punjab province, where 808 “encounters” with police reportedly resulted in the deaths of 1,100 suspects.

According to HRCP, the organization had previously warned the Punjab government that the Punjab Crime Control Department (CCD) appeared to regularly use lethal force as a tactic to “control” crime.

The rights body further criticized the killing of a nine-year-old child, describing it as part of a broader normalization of the use of deadly force outside of due process.

Calling for an immediate judicial inquiry into the incident, the HRCP said, “The fact that this normalization of deadly force outside of due process directly resulted in the death of a nine-year-old child should be a wake-up call to the Punjab government. While the CCD has acknowledged that this incident was a ‘violation’ of departmental rules, the incident cannot be treated as an isolated operational failure, nor can internal accountability replace independent oversight.”

–IANS

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