Pakistan: Changes in law planned to curb terror

Peshawar, 16 Sept. (AKI/DAWN) - The government is introducing major changes to existing anti-terrorism law legislation. The changes give sweeping powers to law-enforcement agencies and courts to effectively deal with militancy and terrorism, according to sources, speaking to Pakistani daily Dawn on condition of anonymity.

The amendments include doing away with the discretionary powers of anti-terrorism courts to grant bail and remand of the accused.

They provide for procuring and recording evidence through modern communication systems, including video-conferencing, to protect potential witnesses and also to hold trials in prisons for security reasons.

‘We are living in a changed environment. The new environment has thrown up some new challenges and it has emerged that the existing anti-terror law is inadequate and too weak to deal with the new challenges,’ a senior official said.

In early May, Pakistan army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani met prime minister Yousaf Raza Gillani and suggested major amendments to the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997.

"The ball has been rolling since then," a military officer said, adding: "We need laws to deal with the scourge."

Some government officials complained that deliberations on the issue had taken too long, while law-enforcement and intelligence agencies continued to round up militants, not only from the troubled northwestern Swat district and surrounding Malakand division but also from other parts of the region.

"They are being bailed out more quickly than babies’ diapers are changed," an official remarked.

According to another official, the anti-terror bill containing the proposed amendments should already have been on Gillani's desk. Over 600 detained militants were awaiting trial, the sources said.

Justice minister Afzal Sandhu acknowledged that the amendments were being finalised and expressed the hope that these would be ready a week after the Eid al-Fitr Muslim holiday next week. "We are holding discussion with all stakeholders, including the army," the minister told Dawn.

"A bill containing the amendments will be tabled in parliament if it is in session or promulgated as an ordinance," he said.

An official said the military was interacting with the federal law division to deliberate on and push through the amendments.

One of the proposed amendments grants powers to the government instead of the superintendents of police to hold a suspect in preventive detention and increases the remand period to 60 days from 30 days.

The remand period should not be less than 10 days in any case, according to the bill. It has been proposed that magistrates in Malakand - where Islamic sharia law courts have been legalised - be given special powers to grant remands of terrorism suspects.

"We have seen that when a court bails out a terrorist or a hardened criminal, witnesses are usually scared of deposing against him, which affects the trial," an official explained.

Another of the bill's proposed amendments seeks to confiscate property belonging to terrorist suspects, which under current law is only allowed in cases involvig hijacking and kidnapping for ransom.

The bill also proposes extending the investigation period from seven days to 90 days to allow investigators to gather evidence in what have become more sophisticated and organised terrorism cases.

Perhaps most significantly, the bill does away with the presumption of innocence, proposing that the onus is on suspects to prove this.

"Ordinarily, a suspect is innocent unless proven guilty, while what we are proposing to do is to shift the burden of proving innocence on the suspects who would be considered guilty unless proven innocent," the official said.

The official said the bill, if approved, would help the government prosecute terrorists and make them pay for their deeds that caused massive losses of life and property.

"The public wants all terror leaders to be caught and executed publicly. At the very least what we can do is to ensure that the terrorists don’t get away by finding loopholes in our legal system," he said. Link...