CITIZENS will be presumed guilty until proven innocent. At least that is the message the political leadership of Balochistan has sent to the people of the province. The Anti-Terrorism (Balochistan Amendment) Act, 2025, adopted last Wednesday by the Balochistan Assembly, states that any individual “suspected of offences enshrined in the anti-terrorism law may be held in preventive detention for up to three months for the purpose of inquiry”. It was passed without any real resistance from the parties present, ostensibly because the province’s elected leadership has run out of ideas about how its violent sociopolitical crisis may be addressed. There is no denying that the state faces immense law-and-order challenges in the province, but will such sweeping legislation solve problems, or merely complicate them by adding more fuel to the fire?

The Balochistan Assembly seems to have made the amendments to provide legal cover to the state, which routinely detains citizens from the province without any formal charge. The vague legal standard for ‘reasonable suspicion’, the absence of judicial checks, the formalised involvement of military forces in policing civilians, and Balochistan’s history of political targeting all but guarantee that this law will be abused, and in turn fuel more of the same anger and discontentment that even today make Balochistan’s problems seem intractable. Even aside from the host of legal and moral issues with the law, if the state really needed these powers, it could have at the very least respected some long-standing Baloch grievances while it was being drafted. For example, it should have said that each detention would be properly documented; that there would be continuous civilian and judicial oversight of each case so that there were no rights abuses in detention; and that the families of detainees would be kept informed of each detainee’s whereabouts and legal status so they would not keep searching for them in desperation. It would have made the law much more palatable. Perhaps it can still be reconsidered.

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2025