Time to abolish the ATCs

One of the motives for establishing the court was to deter political violence in Karachi but,it seems to have failed.

Recently, an anti-terrorism court (ATC) ordered a seizure of Pervez Musharraf’s assets as punishment for the former general’s refusal to show up to his ‘terrorism’ trial. Earlier, it found Rangers personnel guilty of terrorism. In another case, the court granted bail to an MNA suspected of property fraud. Whilst it is true that there is no globally accepted definition of terrorism, we do know that these remarkably dissimilar cases had absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, yet they ended up in the ATC.

The perception that the ATC could ever seriously have had any meaningful impact in deterring terrorism defies historic experience: Nawaz Sharif established these courts in 1999, in part, as another weapon to intimidate his opposition. Thus, how cruel fate proved to be when his own brainchild was employed by arch-nemesis Musharraf to convict Sharif of attempted hijacking and ‘terrorism’. Musharraf may credibly have accused the ex-prime minister of many flaws, but to claim that Sharif was a terrorist was fiction.

Rather opportunistically, of course, Musharraf continued to exploit the ATC to signal his anti-terrorism credentials to the West as he went about rounding up hundreds of ‘terrorists’. Once he was out of power though, he would also soon realise that such institutions owe their loyalty only to the hand that feeds them.

Even though the ATC has proven itself incompetent at deterring terrorism, it is now trying to attract an ever greater share of the judicial caseload by illogically expanding the scope and definition of ‘terrorist’ to include anyone whose acts cause bodily harm and, in the ATC’s own words, “frightens the public” — as the accused Rangers in the Sarfaraz Shah case painfully learnt. Thus, not only ex-dictators, Rangers or dispensable militants, but ordinary criminals can also now be charged with ‘terrorism’ if it is politically desirable to do so and the public sentiment is aroused. So we will see that the court issues indictments in the Benazir Bhutto and Sarfaraz Shah murder cases, but sits idle when political parties play havoc with life in Karachi.

Nevertheless, for all its shortcomings, perhaps we should be forgiving if the ATC actually lived up to its draconian name — so does it? Well, the US government thinks not, albeit for very different reasons: according to a 2010 review of Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorism Court rulings, the US appeared dissatisfied that its acquittal rate remained at “approximately 75 per cent”. From the American perspective, Pakistan’s ATC has failed not because it is a politically malleable institution that will likely convict the wrong people for the wrong reasons, but because it is just not manufacturing enough death and life sentences — a 25 per cent conviction rate seems too low for the US, regardless of the actual accuracy of conviction.

In practice, assessing the empirical efficacy of the ATC is indeed difficult. One of the declared motives for establishing the court was to deter political violence in Karachi but, if this is any indicator, it seems to have failed miserably. As we are sadly witnessing 12 years on, Karachi is still plagued by extrajudicial killings, torture and extortion on the same magnitude that we saw before the birth of the ATC — surely, such acts are much closer to the objective definition of terrorism than most of the cases that end up on the ATC’s docket, so where is the court’s enthusiasm here?

Perhaps, the answer lies in the fact that its political masters never intended the court to have any independent powers when it came to dealing with true cases of terrorism that “frightens the public”.

A decade of failure is enough. Unless President Zardari would like to share the fate of his ‘terrorist’ predecessors after leaving office, the government should abolish the ATC and improve the regular courts — the country cannot afford to pay for yet another kangaroo institution that further chills political competition, demeans the judicial profession and increases the size of the already bloated state, whilst producing little benefit.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 10^th,  2011.