Tinkering with counter-terror laws

In the meantime, the Foreign Affairs Minister plaintively laments that criticism of recent amendments proposed to the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) is ‘unfair.’ To be sure, there is more than a tinge of hypocrisy in the UK preaching to Sri Lanka on these matters when it -- and other European countries as well as the US -- have blithely allowed torture and rendition as part of the global war on terror.

Even so, the PTA is an ancient law that does not belong in today’s world. Its first use was against trade unionists in the seventies. Since then, alleged ‘terrorists’, government critics and other inconvenient voices were all lumped into the same basket, locked up for years on a political whim. Some were released with no reparations; others died in prison. Many became terrorists after being subjected to its indignities.

To be fair, all Governments are guilty as charged in this regard. We recall a ‘yahapalanaya’ Counter-Terror Act (CTA) leaked in the pages of this newspaper, which was far worse than the PTA. Later exposed as a largely ‘cut and paste’ job from the US Patriot Act, it even categorised writings offending ‘ unity’ as a terrorist act. Opposition parliamentarians pictured this week with broad smiles, signing a petition against the proposed amendments to the PTA, were in government then.

Civil society organisations who have responded with howls of outrage to the current amendments, also observed a studied silence at the time. The Foreign Affairs Minister has said that the current amendments are a prelude to replacement of the PTA by a counter- terror law. If so, he must be advised that the earlier CTA is not the way to go. In modern times, the prevention of terrorism is a strategic art. It needs surgically defined legal measures not blows of a sledgehammer crushing all and sundry. We need to learn this lesson from the badly handled West’s war on Islamist terror if not from our own experiences.