Pakistan's Anti-Terrorist Act draws flak

The Nawaz Sharief government in Pakistan has cleared a law that human rights activists say ''aims at fighting terror on the street by unleashing a wave of state terror''.

Called the Anti-Terrorist Act, 1997, the new law follows an upsurge in ethnic violence that has claimed hundreds of lives over the past year in the provinces of Sindh and Punjab.

Enacted by a legislative assembly where his party is in majority, the law has come under fire from lawyers and human rights organisations. Even Sharief's coalition partners have criticised it.

The act has been challenged in three provincial high courts and the supreme court of Pakistan for violating fundamental rights, thus bringing Sharief to the brink of a confrontation with the judiciary.

Last Friday, the supreme court passed an interim order suspending the government directive, on a writ petition filed by the Supreme Court Bar Association.

The act gives the police and other law enforcement agencies sweeping powers and envisages the setting up of special courts with judges appointed by the executive. This, legal experts said, virtually amounts to setting up a parallel system of justice.

What makes the law particularly dangerous is a provision giving an already violent police the right to fire upon not only those caught committing acts of terrorism but even on those suspected to be intending to commit them.

The Pakistani press has criticised this provision, saying the police is known for its penchant for executing suspects in shootouts described as 'police encounters'.

Asma Jehangir, chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said the law reeks of 'ill intentions' and describes the new state of affairs as 'worse than an emergency'. The right to a fair trial seems to have been compromised, she said.

Under the new law, the police will have only seven days to investigate a case. They will be allowed to present videotaped evidence obtained in police custody in the special courts. This throws serious doubts on the credibility of the entire process. The criteria set for the appointment of judges of these special courts too falls short of the normal requirements of the judicial system.

Torture in custody is the rule rather than the exception, and with a one week deadline to meet, forced confessions are likely to provide the most handy form of evidence. The act takes away the right to judicial remand from the courts and denies the accused the right to bail, thus giving the police a free hand to adopt coercive methods while investigating a case.

The courts will also be given just seven days to try the case and come to a decision, a time period that is likely to prove insufficient to hear out both prosecution and defence, with the possibility that the defence will be given the short end of the stick.

The government defends the act, taking the plea that a cumbersome judicial process makes it difficult to bring terrorists to book and that the new law will be effective enough to act as a deterrent in bringing down an alarming graph of violence crime.

Law Minister Khalid Anwar, however, says the law is only a temporary measure. In an interview to the monthly Newsline, Anwar said the ''normal legal system could not cope'' with the situation in Karachi where random killings have become the order of the day. Anwar admitted that he did not see added powers for the police ''as desirable from the point of view of a lawyer''.

Critics of the legislation point out the dismal record of previous measures aimed at dispensing ''speedy justice'' while overlooking the root causes of the crisis which are political: an escalation in violence stems from the country's policies in Afghanistan which brought along drugs and an arms culture.

In the state of Punjab, conflict between the Shia and Sunni sects is played out of the barrel of a gun -- a legacy of the open permission given to madrassas or religious institutions to prepare their followers for jihad or war against the non-believers in a neighbouring country.

Now once again, the spectre of brute force looms large with a police force empowered to shoot at will and a legal system heavily weighed against the accused. Sharief has talked of public hangings as a deterrent to violence, talk that harks back to the days of his mentor, the military dictator Zia-ul Haq.