AS the government benches in the Upper House prepared to push through the problematic Anti-Terrorism Act (Amendment) Bill, 2025, this Tuesday just in time, before the Senate was prorogued, an opposition lawmaker had asked the House: “Will this amendment make Pakistan safer, or will it weaken the constitutional rights we swore an oath to protect?” It was, unfortunately, purely a rhetorical question. The lawmakers behind the legislation could not be convinced to look at it from any angle other than ‘security needs’. “The country is burning in the fire of terrorism,” Law Minister Azam Tarar was quoted as saying, apparently in an indignant response to criticism from the opposition benches that the ATA amendments were draconian, and that a balance should be sought between the need to improve security and parliament’s duty to protect civil rights. The PML-N’s Senator Irfan Siddiqui was more direct. Amending the ATA, he argued, would “prevent crime and also curb forced disappearances and arbitrary detentions”. In other words, the government was stripping more of the public’s rights so that the state could stop the human rights abuses it has historically engaged in. It was a sad irony, no doubt.

So pressing was the need to give the armed forces and civil armed forces the power to take someone even ‘reasonably suspected’ of wrongdoing in preventive detention for three months or more that the government refused to send the bill to a committee for further consideration. This, despite an opposition lawmaker pointing out that provisions of the bill seemed to be clearly violative of existing laws and the Constitution. Indeed, the statement of objects and reasons prefacing the bill seemed to make it clear why the government was being so single-minded: “the current security situation requires a robust response that goes beyond the existing legal framework,” it said. In other words, the government was seeking a law to override the existing legal framework. It was previously pointed out through these pages that if the government was finding itself ‘compelled’ by circumstances to place constitutional rights in abeyance, the circumstances were perhaps not the real problem. It is the state of abject disrepair that state institutions have fallen into, which must be addressed instead. Clearly, the government remains intent on fighting the symptoms rather than curing the affliction. It is unlikely to attain its aims if it pursues this path.

Published in Dawn, August 21st, 2025