Rather than spend time predicting the future and excuses (not to create IPCMC) of a body not yet created, why not do the right thing first? Trying to predict something that has not happened. I think this is like talking nonsense. What about handling those cases that have already happened? Spend your time wisely or wasting away our money on unknown organization and unknown future. But then BN can make things happen just to prove they are right even though it is not the actual event, but a staged event. Torture victims in police lockup is what then? Not worse than criminal? What happened to Teoh Beng Hock and the rest? What treatment did he get? Worse than a criminal?
My one encounter, if that is the appropriate word, with a policeman who had washed his hands in cold blood, was in an empty Amritsar hotel at the height of the Punjab insurrection in the late 1980s. It is difficult to imagine now what Punjab was like then. The Golden Temple, wrecked by Operation Bluestar, had become a symbol of the broken Sikh heart. Terrorism, inspired by the dream of secession, acquired a raging justification . Amritsar was sullen by day and silent by night; fear haunted Punjab like a living ghost.
Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi today tried to put an end to calls for an Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC), saying that it body would treat police worse than criminals. Wan Junaidi, you are obviously ignorant of the fact that at least one former judge had sat on the RCI panel that came up with the recommendation to establish the IPCMC. He must have known whether the proposed Commission would, as you have stated, “breach everything – the constitution and natural justice”. Your contention, therefore, has no merit. By the way, is your doctorate of any value or is it yet another one of those dubious ones? Since the (operation of the) proposed IPCMC was drafted by the former Chief Justice Mohamed Dzaiddin Abdullah, it CANNOT be Not in line with the federal Constitution and it should NOT be against the concept of justice as argued by the HM. To the fair minded rakyat, the HM and IGP are not acting fairly towards those good and well disciplined cops and their families because IPCMC works two-way, it also serve to preserve the reputation of those good, duty bound and well disciplined cops in PDRM ( Say in cases where those in custody could have genuinely died not because of being tortured), so that none of them could be wrongly accused by the public, is it not so? The fact that HM and IGP are so strongly opposed to the setting up of IPCMC, one that is commonly found in advanced countries, is a deadly giveaway of the credibility and reputation of the PDRM, as if they are trying hard to prove something that nobody doubts!!!Suara Keadilan Malaysia blogged Systematic ethnic cleansing on the way! Skewed vision of Khalid Abu Bakar & Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi ‘s apathy
The IPS officer had come for a chat in the evening; only police vehicles moved after sunset. There was a look of almost unnatural calm on his face, and it was only in the middle of a largely onesided conversation that it occurred to me that this was the visage of narcotic serenity. Perhaps his nerves needed solace, or possibly his conscience. But when he spoke he did not quiver. He was on the front lines of a vicious war launched by elements who wanted to partition India again. It was his duty to destroy them first, he said with a thin smile that started on his lips but petered out midway. It would be gratuitous to mention his faith, but those locked in conventional wisdom would be surprised.
. A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. civil society indicating that both had certain common features and suggested that the role and nature of civil society is reflective of the role and condition of the State and that the development of one could not be understood in isolation from the other. In both, there is a prevalence of corruption, weak leadership rooted in a neo-patrimonial political culture, ethnic and class divisions as well as tendencies towards may be linked to the lack of a strong, effective system which could have fostered the creation of a shared national identity. There is evidence to suggest that such a formation did not occur in countries that have been colonized in the past after independence. This may have hampered the genesis of national cohesion and the ability of the State to evolve to nationhood. The objective of my PhD research is to investigate the role of instition reposible in State formation through a comparative analysis of Malaysia and india.he exception as the rule Good Intentions cannot justify bad deliver Bill passd in parliamnt are not in the laudable intention but in the clogged delivery. The desire to be politically correct has overtaken the imperative to be politically sensible. Method and order structural flaw could further erode the already ebbing credibility of our parliamentary systemThe irony is that such flaws can be easily corrected, with some time and thought. Both have been absent from the process, the favourite weapons of Hercule Poirot, might be usefully employed in analysis.It is odd that the government should have chosen law and order as its final alibi after some exhausting self-laceration in its search for a credible explanation for the escape ofJusticWhen Instuation smuggled The Predators to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over years; this central truth has not.the umbilical chord of the colonial, or neo-colonial. Who had dared to arrest a pillar of the American corporate establishment. ‘Bail or no bail’: what was a rotten piece of paper signed in an Indian court worth to a lord of Wall Street? Not even the decency of silence. Anderson was publicly, even proudly, contemptuous of those who did not have the courage to interrupt his freedom for a mere industrial disaster in which a few thousand semi-slave Indians had been gassed to death within hours and thousands more would die over years.Accusation is the easy exit route from Bhopal. Introspection will take us back to the beginning. Betrayal is impossible without trust. We did not trust Carbide to be honest. We trusted our political class, and it continues to search for new and inventive ways to betray us again.
Why do we say “law and order” rather than “order and law”? Simple. Law comes before order. Law defines the nature of order. Law is the difference between civilization and chaos. Law is evolutionary: the edicts of tribes, chiefs and dynasties lifted human societies from scattered peril to structured coexistence. The laws of democracy have vaulted us to the acme of social cohesion, for they eliminated arbitrary diktat and introduced collective will. The divine right of kings is dead; it has been reborn as the secular right of an elected Parliament.
The burden of independence OF Justice
The unfortunate truth is that there is reason for this cynicism. A lot of the opinions that abound in media, both mainstream and social, are rooted in pre-fabricated positions that fly under the flag of one label or another. In addition, over the last few years it has become clear that very few of our certitudes about the independence ofjustice the allegedly independent institutions stand up to scrutiny.
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order.
It is odd that the government should have chosen law and order as its final alibi after some exhausting self-laceration in its search for a credible explanation for the escape of JUSTICE
Why do we say “law and order” rather than “order and law”? Simple. Law comes before order. Law defines the nature of order. Law is the difference between civilization and chaos. Law is evolutionary: the edicts of tribes, chiefs and dynasties lifted human societies from scattered peril to structured coexistence. The laws of democracy have vaulted us to the acme of social cohesion, for they eliminated arbitrary diktat and introduced collective will. The divine right of kings is dead; it has been reborn as the secular right of an elected Parliament.
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. When Instuation smuggled The Predators to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over 26 years; this central truth has not.
Promoting equality of unequally?
legal system,local or in international sphere the subjects of law are the persons, nationals and judicial, upon whom the law confers rights and impose duties .In international law these persons are normally states, but they are not so exclusively. States have been described by Weber as the human community that claim itself the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence within the territory with determined boundaries .However, the advisory opinion in the case concerning Reparation for the injuries suffered of the united nation ,the international court of justice rejected the view that the only states can be subjects of international law and affirmed that ―throughout its history ,the development of international law has been influenced by the requirements of international life and the progressive increase in the collective activities of states has already given a rise to instances of actions upon the international plane by certain entities which are not states.
Ever since India’s war on terror began in earnest after September 11, 2001, the Intelligence Bureau’s motto has been ‘it is better to be safe than be sorry’ and the operating principle has been ‘do what you want but do not get caught’.
But it is only now, once the Ishrat Jahan alleged fake encounter case burst out in the open, that we hear of rancourous recriminations and smear involving a senior IB officer suspected to have conspired with some Gujarat police officers and a section of the state’s political leadership to engineer the targeted killing of four persons, two of them Pakistani nationals, alleged to be members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba tasked to assassinate Narendra Modi.
Counterterrorism is a dirty business in which Indian intelligence agencies and police forces have, in some cases, employed questionable means and brutal methods of organised killings of suspected terrorists and terror sympathisers. Extrajudicial killings have been employed with chilling efficiency in Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, the northeast and in cities like Mumbai and Delhi that too have been targets of terrorist strikes and organised crime.
As the lead agency in the fight against terror, the IB has used both covert operations and traditional information gathering, distinct areas for within-agency “cowboys and eggheads”, respectively. Although there is no legal basis for any security agency to authorise assassinations, which in itself must be repugnant in a society guided by the rule of law, the IB has from time to time facilitated extrajudicial killings with neither the political leadership nor the public any wiser. Targeted executions took on a ‘when-nothing-else-works’ character.
The attention the IB has drawn because of the Ishrat Jahan case — it is still unclear whether the officer in question played any direct role in the alleged fake encounter, though the Special Investigating Team believes it has sufficient evidence to nail him — is totally foreign to an agency accustomed to limited accountability and virtual independence in most of its activities.
Since the IB is not a creature of law, it took — and continues to take — advantage of the concept of “plausible denial” which determines when the agency’s top management would wash their hands of wrongdoings or malfeasance. In most cases, the political leadership offered protection to the agency, which, on its part, supplied the government in power with political intelligence. This is a convenient trade-off, suiting both parties.
The bureaucracy and successive political parties in power have largely been dictated by a mindset that has traditionally been apathetic to human rights in situations of fighting Islamic terror. This is typical of an ‘end justifies the means’ approach in which decision-makers raise no objections because the intelligence agencies are perceived to be working in the best interests of the country and national security priorities.
True, the IB’s missions require secrecy and to do their job well intelligence officers, both handling operations and analysis, must be willing to take risks. They must anticipate dangers to national security and take steps to meet those challenges. Action based on “duff intelligence” or planning extrajudicial killings are not means that should shape the response of a security organisation that is more venerated among several others in terms of the credo of professionalism. No matter how powerful an intelligence agency, that power is not licence for it to collude in or facilitate extrajudicial killings.
Protecting an intelligence agency, on the ground that in the fight against terror simple intelligence gathering would not suffice and sometimes brutal methods need to be applied to defeat the monster of terrorism, can be counterproductive. The secrecy and the deception that surrounds clandestine dark operations are justified, often by turning a blind eye or a deaf ear, as indispensable to the agency and to national security interests.
But when it spills into the domain of counterterrorism policy, serious questions involving subversion of the democratic process and the rule of law arise. Among the most basic of questions is: to what extent are the IB and some other security agencies compatible with the democratic system and how can they be effective organisations and yet not abuse human rights?
Much before Punjab this argument was heard in the North East; then repeated in Kashmir. As terrorism spread its footprint across India through the 1990s and first decade of the new century, reaching a horrific, televised climax in Mumbai when gunmen, armed and trained in Pakistani sanctuaries , a dilemma has ebbed and flowed through the tides of Indian public opinion. Can outlaws be contained through the binding laws of a liberal democracy ? Should right to life, a fundamental tenet of our Constitution, be extended to those who kill innocents , arbitrarily, bomb buildings, hijack aircraft, or target places of worship in order to inject poison into the demographic veins of India? Theory has the good fortune of living in a black-and-white textbook . Reality is grey. Terrorists thrive in shadow wars, protected by a paradox: since they are out of uniform, they can always claim innocence until the moment they pull a trigger. We forget the number of alibis that were floated even after something as self-evident as the 2008 Mumbai attack and some were repeated in Parliament by a Cabinet minister in the UPA government. Our security forces have to hunt in such treacherous fog. Their job is to succeed before the trigger is squeezed, to find Indira Gandhi’s and Rajiv Gandhi’s assassins before they have succeeded, and to stop a thousand attacks on civilians during a festival or any other day. The Army has the umbrella of a special act to limit accountability in case of a mistake. The spirit of democracy argues against such privilege, but the visceral need for security against covert evil pulls in the other direction. The trouble with sanction for murder is that it brutalizes and breeds rogues, particularly in our police, where any moral code has been weakened by corruption and arrogance. Police have jailed and killed innocents, coerced money out of helpless victims, confident that politicians, themselves largely corrupt, will never find the courage to confront them. The worry is that public opinion often condones “Dirty Harry” methods, in which a bullet takes precedence over due process. When, in 1993, it became clear that criminals owing allegiance to Dawood Ibrahim were involved in the horrific Mumbai blasts, the city’s police were offered freedom of the trigger. Citizens approved, as did the Congress, Shiv Sena, BJP and voters. Films glorified ‘encounter specialists’ . The syndrome is no longer as gory, but Chulbul Pandey still shoots first and whistles later. In 2008 Delhi police killed young men at Batla House. This year, on May 18, a young man in custody, Khalid Mujahid, died in “mysterious circumstances” while being taken to Barabanki jail by the UP police; 42 of them, including senior officers , are under investigation. For years in Hyderabad and Malegaon, “suspects” have been jailed for years without proof of complicity in any terrorist act. Congress or Samajwadi Party were in power in these states. And of course BJP ruled Gujarat when 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan was killed by the police. There is no standard response. Let alone outrage, there is hardly any rage about Delhi, UP, Andhra or Maharashtra. Most people have probably chosen their sides over Ishrat Jahan. The CBI’s chargesheet is enough for those who believe she is guiltless. Others stress the IB version that David Headley, convicted of terrorism, mentioned her name; or wonder what she was doing in the company of three men recognized, even by the CBI, as terrorists.
Only one thing is clear in this dust storm of fierce argument. We are not interested in truth. A complex reality has been distilled into campaign fodder in election season. Politics is the petrol that can turn such a fire into conflagration.
The answer is genuine reform. It is easier to reform the bureaucracy. Transforming the intelligence agencies, considered national security holy cows, is more difficult because of a variety of reasons — their unbridled power to act in secrecy, the resistance to change and the status quoist attitude of the political leadership that views the agencies, including the Central Bureau of Investigation, as handy tools to bully and browbeat the opposition or other political rivals. In a government where candour and leadership are in short supply, there is little commitment to being more open in the manner in which intelligence agencies function and lesser still for the protection of individual human rights.
Of course, covert operations cannot be outlawed altogether because we have learned to our peril — several times — when intelligence has let us down. But simplistic minimalist measures to reform the intelligence agencies by reaffirming lawful and ethical behaviour are not enough. Lasting reforms are necessary if the government in general and the intelligence agencies in particular have to win back the trust of the public. The Ishrat Jahan case illustrates the necessity for much greater independent and parliamentary scrutiny of the intelligence agencies.
