ISLAMABAD: The parliamentary committee on the National Accountability Law to amend controversial laws failed to evolve consensus on the issue of across-the-board accountability on Tuesday.

Although this was the recently formed committee’s first in-camera meeting at Parliament House, a few reporters managed to see what was going on in the proceedings before their presence was noticed by the committee’s chairman and federal law minister Zahid Hamid. They were requested to leave the room.

Some members of the committee from the opposition parties demanded across-the-board accountability to bring army generals and judges under accountability laws of civil anti-corruption bodies or the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).

However, one of the members said “bringing judges under accountability laws of NAB will remain a futile exercise as ultimately their cases will go to their colleagues and the accused judges could get some sort of relief there”.

Presently judges and army generals do not come under the purview of NAB and other civilian anti-corruption bodies with a plea that both have their own accountability systems in their organisations.

Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Senator Farhatullah Babar was of the view that NAB laws were used for political re-engineering and there should be “no sacred cows if the law was reviewed”.

Interestingly, the government acknowledged anti-corruption laws being implemented in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) when the committee chairman commented on a proposal agreed to incorporate some effective accountability laws of the provincial government into the NAB laws.

“The committee will review accountability laws of KP,” the chairman of the committee told reporters after the meeting.

He said the committee will also review all previous accountability laws of the country to extract their best provisions and incorporate them into the NAB laws.

Speaker of the National Assembly Sardar Ayaz Sadiq on Jan 5 formed the 20-member parliamentary committee to amend controversial NAB laws, including the plea bargain (PB) and voluntary return (VR) provisions.

The committee has been given three months to prepare and present its report before the speaker regarding necessary amendments in the National Accountability Ordinance (NAO) 1999. The next meeting of the committee will be held on Jan 24.

Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) vice chairman Shah Mehmood Qureshi said that no law would be effective unless it was supported by political will. He said NAB was being driven by eight laws and thus it must be revamped to make it more effective.

Mr Qureshi added that the controversial NAB laws could be amended quite easily instead of going through a hectic effort of incorporating all previous laws in it.

“We can change the controversial NAB laws as we have amended provisions of the PB and VR,” he said, adding that the federal government should also take advantage of effective and fruitful accountability laws of KP.

Published in Dawn, January 18th, 2017