The need for transparency

The death sentences announced as awarded to seven terrorists involved in the Army Public School massacre in December 2014 may offer a degree of much-needed closure for the relatives of the dead. There was always an urgent need for justice to be served in this particular case to avenge the victims of that terrible tragedy. The men sentenced by a military court have the right of appeal and doubtless we will be informed in due course as to the success or otherwise of their appeals. How long this might take is unknown. The establishment is very good at managing information and does an excellent job of controlling what is and what is not in the public domain. There are understandable operational security reasons for much of this tight management — Operation Zarb-e-Azb being a case in point — but such opacity is perhaps not suitable for all contexts.

All the men sentenced were tried ‘in camera’. There has been little disclosure of where or how they were captured or arrested, and by whom. There has been no presentation of the evidence to support a guilty verdict and no presentation of the men’s antecedents, other than for one of them said to have been involved in an attack on Rangers in Karachi in 2011. The ISPR said that the men had been afforded legal counsel in their defence and that their trials were fair. Be that as it may, as information on the proceedings were not part of the public domain, it is difficult to ascertain this. There is a need for credibility to be attached to the way military courts conduct themselves. The perception that this is invisible and arbitrary justice, where the writ of habeas corpus does not run and invisible judges pass sentences on invisible defendants, must not be allowed to develop. Whilst there is an uncomfortable necessity for the military court in exceptional circumstances, such as the ones the country is passing through at this point in time, justice should still be seen to be done, even if only in part, for security reasons.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 16^th, 2015.

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