Pakistan: Rights group urges withdrawal of Punjab’s ‘Habitual Offenders’ Bill, calls it ‘regressive’

Islamabad: Several civil society activists, lawyers and journalists in Pakistan called for the withdrawal of Punjab’s ‘Habitual Offenders’ bill, describing it as “regressive” and warning that if enacted, the legislation would have a corrosive impact on human rights protections in the country.

Addressing a round table organised by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), human rights lawyer Asad Jamal said that the primary intent of the bill was to enable the state to legally disregard civil liberties through the use of vague terms such as “habitual offender” and “anti-social behaviour”.

“He also expressed concern over Section 5 of the bill, under which the provincial government could empower an intelligence committee arbitrarily and without accountability to register cases against a perceived ‘habitual offender’,” the HRCP stated.

Academic Adnan Sattar remarked that the bill had taken “repressive legality” to an extreme extent, while appealing to civil society to adopt a more pragmatic approach to campaigning against such “regressive laws”.

Additionally, HRCP Punjab vice-chair Raja Ashraf observed that the space for debate in legislative bodies in Pakistan had shrunk.

Pakistani lawyer Ali Javed Darugar warned that the bill was effectively an upgrade of colonial laws and argued that “devolution and state accountability were the only way to escape what had become a vicious cycle.”

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

Last month, the HRCP expressed grave concern over persistent extrajudicial killings in Pakistan’s Punjab province, where 808 police ‘encounters’ reportedly have resulted in the deaths of 1,100 suspects.

According to the HRCP, the organisation had earlier cautioned the Punjab government that the Crime Control Department (CCD) Punjab appeared to be routinely using lethal force as a tactic to “control” crime.

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

Calling for an immediate judicial enquiry into the incident, the HRCP said, “The fact that this normalisation of lethal force outside due process has directly resulted in the death of a nine-year-old child should be a call to conscience for 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 substitute for independent oversight.”

IANS