It was four-to-one on the bench and the four in question have decided that civilians being tried for the May 9th riots shall not be tried in military courts. Regardless of how one feels about the perpetrators of the acts of that day, the principled stance should be to appreciate this decision by the Supreme Court.
The apex court said the trials of 103 civilians and accused persons, identified by the government in a list provided to the SC, and all other persons who may be placed under trial in connection with the events of May 9 should be held in criminal courts.
“It is further declared that any action or proceedings under the Army Act in respect of the aforesaid persons or any other persons so similarly placed (including but not limited to trial by court martial) are and would be of no legal effect,” the court added.
For those awfully concerned about Pakistan’s image abroad, it is worth noting that it is steps like these that redeem our image as a republic with a working judicial system. The counterclaim to a statement like this would be that the impression of impunity being given to rioters doesn’t do our image any good either. But that stems from a misunderstanding of the judgment. It does not absolve the rioters, but only asserts that the responsibility for deciding their innocence or guilt, and their punishment in case of the latter, rests on the shoulders of the civil judiciary.
In civilised democracies, civil rights activists try to wrest even serving military officials from court martials and try to get them tried in civil courts. They fail, of course, because court martials do have a place in all the militaries of the world, but there is at least a constant pressure to do away with the opacity of the military court process as much as it is possible.
This suspicion on the nature of military courts should not be taken as a comment on our own army, because it is a worldwide phenomenon. As the famous French prime minister Clemenceau quipped, “Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.”
