Business Recorder Editorial January 11, 2019

Military courts’ extension

The PTI government has decided ‘in principle’ to extend the military courts’ term that is due to expire on March 30, 2019. However, this may turn out to be a fool’s errand since, according to Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry, the government does not have the two thirds majority in parliament required for the constitutional amendment. Although the minister has suddenly softened his tone on the opposition while talking about approaching the PPP and the PML-N on the issue, the prospects seem dim because of the walloping of these two parties’ leadership that Fawad Chaudhry has been administering on a daily basis since this government assumed office in August 2018. The PPP has decided in its Central Executive Committee meeting in Naudero on December 26, 2018 not to support an extension in the term of the military courts. The PML-N seems not to have found time so far from its leadership’s troubles to conduct an internal consultation on the issue, without which the party remains publicly non-committal. However, given the state of relations between the government and the opposition, it seems a stretch of the imagination to envisage a cooperative atmosphere suddenly emerging to facilitate the government’s extension wish.

Military courts were set up in January 2015 in the wake of a shell-shocked country trying to cope with the terrible Army Public School massacre of schoolchildren and their teachers in Peshawar in December 2014. In that obtaining climate, many democrats swallowed their reservations about military courts, despite the fact that some of them had faced such courts in the past during periods of military dictatorship and those who did not were more than familiar with the way they functioned and what they wrought. However, the 23^rd Amendment that gave legal and constitutional cover to the military courts set up to try civilians on terrorism charges incorporated a sunset clause whereby these courts’ term would expire after two years. In January 2017, when the issue of extending their term arose, failure to forge a similar consensus amongst the parties in parliament prevented movement on this front till March 2017 when, it is alleged, ‘pressure’ was exerted on the opposition PPP to acquiesce in the extension. The extension for another two years followed, which was assented to by the President on March 31, 2017. Now the expiry date looms again, but in changed circumstances in which terrorism has dramatically abated after the military’s counterinsurgency campaigns in the tribal districts. This fact alone is likely to resurrect all the reservations about military courts that had to be swallowed as a bitter pill twice in the last four years. And, as mentioned above, the state of relations between the government and the opposition does not bode good for the cooperation from the latter desired by the former for this purpose.

Quite apart from these considerations and notwithstanding reservations with regard to transparency, due process and justice, the record of the military courts brought into existence in 2015 does not inspire confidence on the touchstone of end-result. Hardly any of the death sentences imposed on the accused by the military courts in the last four years have been upheld on appeal to the high courts despite the COAS approving the ultimate punishment. Those convicted by the military courts have been either acquitted outright or their cases are pending in appeals. If there are residual worries regarding the remaining 185 cases pending before the military courts or potential similar cases in future, instead of reinventing an experiment that has failed to inspire confidence, the better alternative may well be to transfer these remaining cases to the anti-terrorism courts, which were after all set up to provide a relatively quick resolution to terrorism cases. If they have failed, the lacunae should be identified and overcome while instituting special protection programmes for the judges, prosecutors and witnesses in such cases, based on reports that part of the problem with the anti-terrorism courts has been this absence of protection.