Electronic Crimes Bill 2015: Public hearing a glimmer of hope for stakeholders

Ministry of IT expected to give serious consideration to people’s concerns

KARACHI: It is a good omen that the National Assembly Standing Committee on Information Technology (IT) has finally scheduled a public hearing for Tuesday (May 12) on the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (PEC) Bill 2015 – the controversial draft which has come in for severe criticism from the private sector, civil society, academia and the general public.

Let us hope that the Ministry of IT and Telecom, which was censured for its unilateral handling of the proposed cybercrime bill, will seriously take into consideration public reservations about the draft.

There is no doubt that the country desperately and immediately needs a fresh and up-to-date cybercrime law and the federation must be appreciated for its willingness to finalise this legislation. However, it is important to include the input of stakeholders before the bill is converted into a law.

Since the cybercrime law affects almost everyone in the country who uses the internet, it must be an authentic document with support from all corners of the society, which is currently not the case.

There are many clauses in the IT ministry’s draft that not only compromise civil liberties but also suppress press freedom and undermine international cooperation against cyber-terrorism.

The draft gives sweeping powers to the government for internet censorship and has broadened the scope of basic cyber terms using vague and technically-flawed definitions, which can be misused to victimise internet users – all of this has already been covered at length by the media.

The standing committee could easily have done away with this criticism, had it not tried to reinvent the wheel – in fact, the country would have a solid cybercrime law in place by now.

What could have been

It may be recalled that stakeholders of the PEC Bill 2014 had reached a consensus after year-long deliberations. The stakeholders’ draft – as it later came to be called – was vetted by the Ministry of Law and endorsed by the member legal of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority.

The PEC Bill 2014 incorporated the international best practices applied by the UK, USA and Canada and was prepared with the technical assistance of the Council of Europe – a convention in Budapest on cybercrime, which is a global treaty and has the whole of Europe and the United States as members.

All it needed was prior approval of the cabinet and it would have been a smooth sailing in parliament to make it a law. The IT ministry, however, rushed through it without the cabinet’s go-ahead and failed to defend it in both the upper and lower houses of parliament. Later on, they made many amendments and turned an otherwise fine document into a mess.

The lawmakers need to understand the gravity of the matter from the citizens’ point of view, the same citizens who elected them to represent their interests in parliament while framing such laws.

They need to understand the legislation’s impact on the IT industry and foreign investors. If this draft becomes a law, we should simply forget that a company like Google will ever register its business in the country – not to mention scores of expatriates, who returned to Pakistan along with their investments and expertise in the sector, will wind up their business and leave the country.

It is a question whether the legislature, after Tuesday’s public hearing, deals with the matter wisely as opposed to swiftly passing the bill into law, which appeared to be the case until very recently. We can only hope that they do not repeat past mistakes when they completely excluded legal experts and civil society from the process.

THE WRITER IS A STAFF CORRESPONDENT

Published in The Express Tribune, May 11^th,  2015.

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