An odd proposition

www.dawn.com
Editorial
20 July 2001

The draft law finalized by the National Reconstruction Bureau detailing the formation of the metropolitan city police system and likely to be promulgated on August 14, can be termed anything but an Independence Day present to the nation. It seems that the NRB is bent upon imposing a police system on the cities, as part of one of its quick-fix components of the devolution plan, that no one is willing to accept. The draft has been formally opposed by Punjab, Sindh and the NWFP governments - as also by a cross-section of legal experts - on the ground that it proposes to give magisterial powers to the police department.

Some sections of the draft law are truly draconian. These include the police exercising powers to detain suspects for 24 hours and imprison them for 14 days, as a result of being vested with magisterial powers along with those of prosecution. Under the new law, the police will also have powers to enter, search, cordon off public and private premises, and even evict the lawful occupants of such premises, without the affected being allowed recourse to any judicial remedies.

That these incongruent clauses will form part of the police system to be set up in the country's major cities, is hard to believe. True, the police need to be made independent of the political and administrative machinery, but in doing so, prime consideration should be given to the rights of the citizens for whose protection and safety the entire system is meant to be revamped. If the law goes into force in its present form, it will amount to giving the police a carte blanche to trample upon civic liberties. The NRB is wrong if it thinks that such a provision will reform the police system, much less accomplish any of its goals of devolution of power.