Amending PPC

A new report by the Islamabad Policy Research Institute builds a strong case for amendments to the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) to make it more applicable to modern problems. The code is primarily a Raj-era document, even carrying the date of the original Indian Penal Code of 1860.

Despite several amendments in the remaining decades of British rule and since the birth of Pakistan, several aspects of the code are still insufficient to prosecute present-day problems. We have also seen how the incomplete nature of the code and the ensuing patchwork fixes in the past led to criminals making use of a plethora of loopholes to avoid punishment and snub their noses at the concept of justice. Among the areas where this is most obvious are mob violence and gender-based crimes.

It is still difficult to charge and later convict members of mobs committing crimes without rock-solid evidence against individual members, even though most legal systems allow serious penalties against all members of mobs and gangs based on mere participation in the group committing crimes, even if there is not enough evidence of participation in the specific criminal act.

The report also suggests legal amendments to lower the age of adulthood from 18 to 16. While this would help ensure younger violent offenders cannot escape punishment, it is a slippery slope for how young is too young to be an adult. There is also a strong argument for allowing 16-year-olds access to all the rights of an adult, but that could have disastrous consequences at many levels, and a better model may be to allow judges to make the call to try individuals as adults on a case-by-case basis.

Meanwhile, the report also calls for the creation of rehabilitation institutes for people who have served out their sentences for gender-based crimes to help reduce the risk of recidivism, and separately for measures to ensure the security of lower court judges to ensure they can handle tricky cases, especially those involving blasphemy claims, without fearing for their own lives.