The Punjab Control of Habitual Offenders and Anti-Social Behaviour Bill, 2026, seems to be already making headlines for the wrong reasons
On Sunday, Punjab Assembly Speaker Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan halted the passage of a bill that tends to grant sweeping powers to authorities to monitor and take preventive action against “habitual offenders” and individuals accused of “anti-social” conduct. A video making rounds on social media showed him visibly surprised when PTI’s Rana Aftab Ahmad Khan told him that the bill had already been approved by the Assembly’s Standing Committee on Law. “At the time the Bill was brought to the floor, I was kept in the dark. I take a very serious objection to this,” the speaker noted while wondering aloud whether the deputy commissioner and district police officer would be empowered to act against citizens under the proposed law.
Punjab does have a public-order problem. Extortion, land-grabbing, weapon display, aerial firing, intimidation, online blackmail and organised criminal networks are not imaginary threats. Official figures noted 625 extortion cases in Punjab alone in 2025. But the answer to a weak criminal justice system cannot be a parallel system of executive punishment. That is the danger at the heart of the proposed law. The bill seeks to replace older statutes, including the Restriction of Habitual Offenders (Punjab) Act, 1918, and the Punjab Control of Goondas Ordinance, 1959. Yet in attempting to retire colonial instruments, it risks preserving their spirit in a more invasive form. The draft would create provincial, divisional and district intelligence committees to identify alleged “habitual offenders” and recommend measures that could freeze bank accounts, block or impound CNICs and passports, attach property, seize electronic devices, remove online presence and place citizens under surveillance. It also provides for biometric, fingerprint and DNA records in a centralised Punjab Habitual Offenders Registry.
The context makes the bill far more troubling. In February, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan called for a high-level judicial inquiry into deaths resulting from CCD operations, saying it had documented at least 670 CCD-led encounters over eight months in 2025, resulting in 924 suspects’ deaths and only two police personnel killed. The CCD and government may contest the characterisation of these deaths and point to falling crime figures. But that is precisely the point. A government that is already under scrutiny for using shortcuts in the name of crime control should not be handed a wider legal architecture for coercive executive action without the strictest judicial safeguards.
Punjab should withdraw the draft or send it back for open consultation with lawyers, civil society, digital rights experts, prosecutors, police professionals and opposition members. Any replacement law must narrow definitions, require prior judicial authorisation for coercive measures, make electronic monitoring time-bound and court-approved, protect digital due process, and provide a meaningful right of appeal before an independent judicial forum. If the government wants to fight organised crime, it should strengthen investigation, prosecution, forensics, witness protection and trial timelines. *