WHAT constitutes an act of terror? The legislative aim behind the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997, was to prevent and investigate terrorism, and to expedite the prosecution of terror suspects in special courts. But what has transpired since is an increasing tendency to try ordinary criminal cases under the ATA. Many are violent crimes (including high-profile cases such as the rape-murder of Zainab Ansari by Imran Ali, and the killing of Shahzeb Khan by Shahrukh Jatoi in 2012), while some border on the ludicrous (last year, one man was handed a 14-year sentence for throwing his shoe at a judge). There is also an alarming trend of charging non-violent protesters under the ATA, with the implicit intent of narrowing the scope of what constitutes reasonable free speech. As heinous as some of these offences are, in common with all is the tendency of loosely determining that such acts have “created terror in the public”, despite the lack of tangible links to proscribed militant or terrorist networks. Such casual imprecision in the application of the law has created distortions in the criminal justice system, resulting in a hyper-securitised legal paradigm that effectively benefits no one.

The desire to calm public emotions by imposing maximum penalties on suspects has resulted in the overuse — or, rather, misuse — of an overriding law with its own parallel legal process that bypasses certain due process rights and is less inclined to defendants’ presumption of innocence. A 2014 report by Reprieve and Justice Project Pakistan found that most death row inmates convicted under the ATA were accused of offences that had little or nothing to do with terrorism. This has also resulted in creating another backlog in the antiterrorism courts, thereby negating the very purpose of setting up the ATCs in the first place, and potentially endangering the public as cases go stale, evidence is lost, and prosecution witnesses drop out. Ultimately, the phenomenon has managed to shift the onus away from what is truly needed — criminal justice reform. Police functions are almost entirely reactive rather than public safety-oriented, and there is little incentive for improving the capacity of investigation and prosecution services. The situation also highlights legislators’ failure to address deficiencies in criminal laws, including the issue of pardons being granted by families through coercion or complicity. Speedy justice should not be mistaken for a quick fix that privileges moral panic over dispassionate judgement and state powers over fundamental rights.

Published in Dawn, March 5th, 2019