Lawless laws

The government has unsurprisingly failed to pass draconian anti-money laundering laws which would have given warrantless arrest powers to investigators. Reports suggest that the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Finance unanimously blocked the government-backed bills. Keep in mind that unanimity would mean that even the government’s own members — half of the committee — were too embarrassed to back the bill. While warrantless arrests are allowed by most legal jurisdictions around the world, they are governed by an extremely narrow set of conditions, none of which seem to apply here. The arresting officer is not even explicitly required to identify a crime at the time of an arrest.

Whether intentional or an oversight, the fact that the government would present a bill which explicitly goes against the most basic of human rights would be shocking if not for the fact that the economic policy decisions taken during the last nine months have left many observers numb. The government is also attempting to set limits on the movement of foreign currency through banking channels within the country, violation of which would be an arrestable offence. The only thing this would accomplish is encouraging the use of non-banking channels to transfer money while removing the same money from the oversight of the state.

Regulations can be good for an economy, but such outlandish overregulation can only spell disaster. Whether or not potential blacklisting by the Financial Action Task Force played into the thinking, or lack thereof, that went into this bill is also important, because, as former foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar pointed out, the FATF is more concerned with the enforcement of existing laws. Granting the ludicrous freedom of warrantless arrest would only result in political victimisation and vendetta settling.

Populist sentiment dictates that the ‘dear leader’ act as judge, jury, and executioner and throw those perceived to be criminals into jail first and worry about the legalese later. But justice requires establishing guilt first. The government should keep this in mind if only because it is running out of feet to shoot itself in.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 4^th, 2019.

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