Opposition to Pakistan Punjab Bill intensifies, human rights organizations call it oppressive!

Civil society activists, lawyers and journalists in Pakistan have demanded the withdrawal of the Punjab Government’s proposed ‘Habitual Offenders Bill’. He described the law as “repressive” and “backward-thinking” and said that if implemented, it would seriously affect the protection of human rights in the country.

Speaking at a roundtable organized by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), human rights lawyer Asad Jamal said the main objective of the bill is to give the state legal power to ignore civil liberties through vague terms like “habitual offender” and “anti-social behavior”.

He also expressed concern over Section 5 of the bill. According to him, under this provision, the Punjab government can give an intelligence committee the right to register a case against any person by considering him as a “habitual offender” without any accountability.

Speaking at the meeting, academician Adnan Sattar said the bill takes “repressive legalism” to the extreme. He appealed to the civil society to launch a practical and organized campaign against such laws.

HRCP Punjab Vice President Raja Ashraf said that the scope for open debate and discussion within legislative institutions in Pakistan is continuously decreasing.

Lawyer Ali Javed Darugar described this bill as a modern form of colonial era laws and said that decentralization of power and accountability of the government is the only way out of this vicious circle.

Meanwhile, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) MP Sheikh Imtiaz claimed that this bill violates at least 14 articles of the Constitution of Pakistan. These include fundamental rights such as the right to a fair trial and freedom of movement. He alleged that many times MLAs are not even provided a copy of the bills before discussion.

It is noteworthy that last month also HRCP had expressed serious concern over the continuous fake encounters (extra-judicial killings) in Punjab province.

According to the human rights organization, 1,100 suspects have been killed in 808 alleged police encounters in Punjab. The Commission had earlier cautioned the Punjab government that the Crime Control Department (CCD) was regularly using lethal force in the name of crime control.

The HRCP also noted the recent death of a nine-year-old boy, saying this incident is a dangerous example of the normalization of the use of lethal force outside the judicial process. The organization demanded a judicial inquiry into the matter, saying that departmental action alone is not enough. Without independent and impartial monitoring, such incidents cannot be effectively stopped.