Daily Times

The case against the presidential ordinance amending the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) at the Islamabad High Court (IHC) is another thing that’s not going too well for the government. The Attorney General of Pakistan (AGP) has been asked to make time from his busy schedule and present arguments at the next hearing on March 30, but Chief Justice Athar Minallah has already more or less set the tone. The court noted that the ordinance was indeed promulgated in a violation of the constitution because a session of the national assembly had already been convened. He, too, questioned the haste with which the government had pushed it through and wondered why it was so afraid of social media.

More importantly, though, he pointed out how the report submitted by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) revealed that journalists were being monitored over the internet. This is an outrage and yet another one of those examples of where the state itself blurs the lines between independence and harassment of the media and media workers. Surely, the court will take very serious note of this as this case wraps up. What the IHC chief justice said about the “practice of self-censorship in a democracy,” was also a very important message for the government, especially since he added that while Pakistan was a signatory to international civil rights treaties, it was going against them with such ordinances.

All things considered, the ruling party ought to have understood by now that it clearly overstepped the line with both these amendments and the way it has tried to enforce them. The CJ also very rightly observed that amendments to Section 20 of PECA, criminalising defamation with a jail sentence of up to five years, amounted to misusing it to “end political debates.”

However, now that all of the government’s time and attention is occupied with something very different, and it is on the warpath, perhaps it realises the folly of forcing regressive policies into law. For, such things tend to upset not just the people that they very deliberately target, but also the people that form the government. Because despite PTI’s increasingly authoritarian streak, Pakistan is still a working democracy and its leaders will still have to go to the people for votes. And even ordinances cannot silence votes. *