A dangerous law

If this government could roll back history and prevent the internet from ever coming to Pakistan, then it would. In the absence of an inability to tamper with time, the PML-N has come up with a deeply flawed piece of legislation that veers between outright folly and Orwellian excess — the Prevention of Electronic Cyber Crimes Bill (PECB), which its parliamentary majority allowed it to bulldoze through parliament despite the opposition of every other party in the house. The Minister of State for Information Technology, Anusha Rehman, rejected out of hand opposition calls to review a range of clauses, which it is said violate a slew of fundamental rights, and the law of the land just acquired a very dubious piece of legislation.

The executive now has in its hands a range of sweeping powers that may be used against any of the 34,342,400 (estimated July 1, 2016) or 17.8 per cent of an estimated population of 192,826,202 — who use the internet. These figures are likely to be an underestimate. The numbers using the internet are growing at around two per cent gross annually. Minister Rehman gave a hint of the paranoia that underlays the new law saying that anybody who spoke against it was following an “NGO agenda” and taking directions from “foreign elements”. This is preposterous nonsense but indicative of the thinking around which the law was framed.

Opposed as we are to a range of clauses within the new law, there are parts of it that, properly exercised, have merit. Few would challenge the criminalisation of the “recruitment planning and funding of terrorism” for example. But curbs on the freedom of speech of “parody or satire based websites” is a step too far, and aims to shut down or muzzle those who are critics of the government — and they are many. There are unanswered questions about how the surveillance will be conducted that will feed the implementation of the PECB. We do not know which agency is to do the watching and who will watch the watchers. It now remains to be seen how the law will be enforced and how the courts will react. Pakistan just got darker.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 13^th, 2016.

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