Smooth sailing for key bills

Bill to reform NAB was easily passed by a joint sitting of Parliament, and will now be signed into law.

The government bill to reform the National Accountability Bureau and another one to block overseas Pakistanis from voting and defer the use of electronic voting machines were easily passed by a joint sitting of Parliament, and will now make their way over to President Arif Alvi’s desk to be signed into law. While the President may not be enthused about signing the bills, legally, he can only delay signing by 10 days before they automatically pass.

Law Minister Azam Nazir Tarar noted during the joint parliamentary session that the President had already sent the bills back with a list of suggested amendments, even though both houses had approved them. Tarar claimed the only reason Alvi sent the bills back was to appease his party chief, former prime minister Imran Khan — the election bill essentially undoes all of the election law changes passed by the PTI, which most analysts agreed would almost exclusively have benefitted the former ruling party. As for the NAB amendment, the change that the President complained about most publicly was the transfer of the burden of proof from suspect to prosecution. But this is the case with most laws in most countries that follow Blackstone’s ratio: it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

Even Pakistan follows the rule for most laws, but the NAB law essentially made it the accused person’s duty to disprove allegations rather than the prosecution’s duty to build a bulletproof case. This is also why most of Pakistan’s overseas inquiries into money laundering fall flat — investigators don’t know how to find dirt; they just throw a heap of it and hope something sticks. This, in turn, is why NAB is considered a tool to harass opponents rather than pursue real justice.

But the real excitement of the day was outside the Parliament building, where PTI’s women wing held a noisy protest and later tried to scale the main entrance after being denied entry. The entire episode was an exercise in futility — the handful of protesters were nothing more than a nuisance — and the theatrics appeared even more outlandish because of the fact that many of the protesters are members of the National Assembly and could have legitimately registered their protest inside the Parliament if not for their party chief’s opposition to accepting his party’s role as the opposition.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 11^th, 2022.

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