ISLAMABAD: The government is facing a battle to enact a tough anti-terror law rights activists and opposition parties have attacked as repressive.
The Protection of Pakistan Ordinance allows security forces to detain suspects for up to 90 days without disclosing their whereabouts or allegations against them.
Anyone arrested under the law must prove their innocence, reversing the usual legal burden of proof, and satisfy courts they are not engaged in terror activities.
The government introduced the legislation to curb violence and instability blighting the nuclear-armed state.
Pakistan has been in the grip of a homegrown Taliban insurgency since 2007 and faces a violent separatist movement in southwestern Baluchistan province and rising sectarian violence, much of it orchestrated by banned groups such as Laskhar-e-Jhangvi.
Law enforcement agencies and the sclerotic courts system have struggled to make any impact on violence.
The lower house of parliament, controlled by the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N), approved the bill earlier this week.
But the main opposition Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) says it will fight to block it in the upper house, where it holds sway.
“Pakistan will become a police state,” senior PPP Senator Farhatullah Babar said yesterday.
He warned the law legitimises enforced disappearances, an issue on which rights groups routinely criticise Pakistan.
Campaigners say up to 2,000 people have disappeared from custody of security services, many from Baluchistan.
“It also legitimises extrajudicial killings, because the law authorises police and the military to shoot anybody on the basis of reasonable suspicion, without evidence,” Babar said.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged the Senate to reject the law and send it back to the National Assembly for amendments.
“The ordinance as drafted runs roughshod over rights provided under international law and Pakistan’s constitution,” HRW’s Brad Adams said in a statement.
AFP
