Editorial
Letting off alleged murderers
Where is the rule of law?
It is bald-faced miscarriage of justice -- and we hang our head in shame for the way political partisanship has been allowed to influence legal procedures and distort the rule of law in the country.
A report carried in a national Bangla daily informs us that in view of the withdrawal of a much talked about murder case involving the murder of a businessman of Dhaka in 2005, 19 leading criminals, including two who are also accused in several dozen other murder cases, and who are also absconding and believed to have taken shelter across the border, have been set scot-free.
The murder case was withdrawn under a dispensation called the 'withdrawal of politically motivated cases' installed by the AL government after it came to power, to review the cases that were instituted, supposedly on political considerations to harass the AL party men, by the erstwhile four-party alliance government.
There is no doubt that every regime has used the process of law to harass political opponents, and in this very column we had warned about exercising the greatest of discretion in reviewing such cases, and of the dangers of political prejudice distorting the legal process, when the present AL alliance government thought about reexamining the cases. Unfortunately, brazen political consideration has come in the way of the judicial process, the rule of law and administration of justice.
The very idea of review in itself is flawed since it seeks to circumvent the process by having a supra-legal body adjudicating the merit of the case, and the committee set up at the district level as well as the national committee for this purpose, virtually becoming a court in themselves. We had recommended that the legal process should be allowed to run its course.
It is difficult to accept the statement of the state minister for law that this perhaps was a mistake since the case does not merit being withdrawn, that there are six thousand cases and it is not possible to attend each one of them individually, and that the recommendations were made by the district committee. It is they that have taken up so many cases and their argument is unacceptable. We also find it hard to believe that the sitting MP of the AL recommended the withdrawal and indeed he now says that his recommendation was in respect of somebody else. And may we ask if the court that accepted the recommendation was not aware that some of the accused were absconding and therefore not eligible for consideration?
Regrettably, the matter smacks of partisanship, of an effort to subvert to process of law. And this is something that one who is committed to the rule of law cannot feel comfortable with. This strikes at the very fundamental of good governance, which demands upholding the principle of rule of law at all costs.
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