When the shoe is on the other foot

EDITORIAL: If Prime Minister Imran Khan’s own previous sermons are anything to go by, the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act Ordinance 2002, promulgated by President Arif Alvi, is going to prove self-defeating.

Because such steps aimed at gagging social media are only employed by governments that don’t understand this phenomenon at all, to say the least. It was because of social media, after all, that the 21st century brought novelties such as the Arab Spring and Brexit. So the very least that this ordinance does is beg the question of whether the prime minister, Imran Khan, did not understand this issue properly back then or his government doesn’t understand it now?

Nobody buys the official line that this is being done to bring sanity to social media discourse and control “fake news” because laws are already in place to deal with issues relating to defamation. The argument that this owes to the present government’s very low threshold of criticism is more credible because it’s already been doubling down to control all media platforms for more than two years now — its list of initiatives also includes the controversial Pakistan Media Regulatory Authority (PMRA).

Now PECA not only makes defamation a non-bailable cognizable offence and increases jail-term from three to five years, but also gives more powers to Federal Investigation Agency (FIA). It also gives the right to any citizen in the whole country, not just aggrieved parties, to file complaints against online defamation and makes it mandatory for courts to decide cases within six months.

And it’s come at a strange time, when the Islamabad High Court (IHC) was examining the legality of Section 20 of the Act. Among other things, the said section redefines the nomenclature of “aggrieved person”, changing it from “natural person” to including “any company, association or body of persons whether incorporated or not, institutions, organisations, authority or any other body established by the government”.

In fact, it’s been reported that during a recent hearing, amicus curiae Advocate Adnan Randhawa submitted a report before IHC Chief Justice Athar Minallah which said that Section 20 “violates constitutional rights of freedom of expression and freedom of the press” and even suggested reversing the law. Let’s not forget that this came alongside another ordinance, which amended the Elections Act 2017, allowing members of parliament, including ministers to run election campaigns, just when the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) was prohibiting parliamentarians from doing just that.

All this is very troubling, but one key issue stands out immediately: the government is bent upon forcing presidential ordinances on the constitution and depriving the house of its right to legitimate debate before important legislation. It is true that ordinances are a part of democracy. However, it is also true that promulgation of ordinances at some extraordinary high speed as a norm rather than an exception can be safely described as subversion of parliamentary democracy.

It’s no surprise that the opposition, media outlets as well as human rights organisations have flatly rejected this blatant attempt to control social media content. Pakistan’s situation requires governments to do what they can to make implementation of existing laws, which is problematic as it is, as forceful as possible.

By not doing that and instead fiddling with those laws to create an environment where it can feel more secure, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) administration is doing nobody any favours in the long-run, especially not itself.

How different the PTI in power has become from the PTI in opposition. And, how conveniently it continues to shift goalposts when the shoe is on the other foot is vividly clear to all.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022