Business Recorder Editorials 5th September 2026

Too much fuss over faceless justice

EDITORIAL: The Punjab Assembly’s passage of the Punjab Anti-Terrorism (Amendment) Bill 2026 should have produced a serious debate about how Pakistan protects judges, prosecutors, lawyers and witnesses in terrorism cases. Instead, the opposition responded with slogan-chanting, accusations of political victimization, and eventually a walkout.

That was unfortunate because whatever legitimate concerns individual provisions may raise, the central purpose of protecting participants in terrorism trials is both logical and rooted in Pakistan’s bitter experience of fighting militancy.

That experience is hardly distant history. Terrorism has claimed around 100,000 lives in Pakistan, devastated communities, attacked security personnel and civilians alike and repeatedly challenged the writ of the state. Yet prosecution has long been one of the weakest links in the counterterrorism chain.

Arresting suspected terrorists achieves little if witnesses are too frightened to testify, prosecutors fear for their families and judges must consider threats extending beyond themselves to their children.

There have been far too many instances over the years of people involved in terrorism cases facing intimidation and threats. In such an environment, conventional assumptions about open proceedings become difficult to maintain without adequate safeguards. Witnesses can withdraw, testimony can collapse, and cases can ultimately fail for want of evidence.

The resulting acquittals then reinforce the impression that the judicial system is incapable of successfully prosecuting terrorism cases, when part of the problem lies in the conditions under which justice is expected to operate.

The amendment’s provision allowing the identities of judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers, and witnesses to be concealed, along with measures such as voice alteration, must therefore be considered against this security reality.

Protecting those involved in exceptionally dangerous proceedings is a reasonable objective. It should, however, be implemented without compromising the constitutional guarantee of a fair trial.

Security and due process must coexist, and the legislation should contain sufficient safeguards to ensure that extraordinary protections cannot be converted into instruments of arbitrary prosecution.

This is where the opposition could have made a more useful contribution. Its concern about the proposed role of a Grade-20 designated official in advising the Lahore High Court chief justice on the classification of “special security cases”, for example, deserved proper examination.

Any arrangement that gives an executive official an important role in determining which cases enter an exceptional judicial framework should be scrutinised carefully for adequate checks, clearly defined criteria and protection against political misuse.

But scrutiny requires participation. Walking out of the Assembly after creating a rumpus surrendered precisely the parliamentary opportunity through which objectionable provisions could have been challenged, amendments proposed, and safeguards demanded.

Opposition parties exist partly to force governments to improve legislation. Simply branding an anti-terror law “draconian” and abandoning the legislative process does little to accomplish that responsibility, particularly when the security problem the law seeks to address is undeniable.

The government, for its part, should resist treating passage of the bill as the end of the matter. Extraordinary procedures inevitably require extraordinary safeguards.

Rules governing classification of cases, anonymity, access to evidence and the rights of defendants must be precise, transparent and subject to judicial oversight. The law must protect the justice system from terrorists without creating opportunities for governments to misuse counterterrorism powers against political opponents.

Pakistan has paid far too high a price for terrorism to pretend that judges, prosecutors and witnesses can always operate safely under ordinary conditions.

Punjab is therefore justified in strengthening their protection. The opposition would have served democracy better by staying in the House and strengthening the law rather than walking out while it was being made.

The discount nobody noticed

EDITORIAL: A Power Division review has found that coal-fired power plants buying from the same international suppliers against the same recognised benchmark were receiving wildly different discounts, ranging from just $0.25 to $7.12 per metric ton.

The government has now responded with a straightforward rule: plants must procure from the contracted supplier offering the best available discount.

The measure could save around Rs380 million a year without requiring any additional investment. It is a sensible intervention, no doubt, yet it also raises the rather uncomfortable question of why something so obvious was allowed to continue for so long.

The discrepancies hardly required extraordinary forensic work to uncover. Procurement data, contractual arrangements and benchmark-linked pricing were already available, and the inefficiencies became apparent once officials actually compared them. In some cases, backup arrangements carried better discounts than primary supply agreements.

In others, plants continued buying from suppliers offering poorer terms even though contracted alternatives were offering better discounts.

When fuel costs ultimately feed into electricity tariffs, such decisions have consequences far beyond the procurement departments making them.

That makes the new policy particularly welcome. Requiring power plants to choose the highest available discount introduces a basic element of commercial discipline into a system where consumers ultimately bear the cost of inefficiency. Imported coal is used both by power producers and by industry, but the economics of the power sector make procurement discipline especially important.

Fuel costs are incorporated into electricity pricing, while subsidies and other fiscal interventions can leave the government carrying part of the burden when sector costs rise. An unnecessary dollar added to a power plant’s coal bill can therefore travel through tariffs, subsidies and public finances before eventually landing on taxpayers and consumers.

Yet the simplicity of the solution exposes the deeper problem. The state machinery has once again discovered an avoidable cost only after allowing it to persist. There was no technological barrier preventing officials from comparing discounts across suppliers.

There was no need for a costly new institution, consultant or elaborate reform programme. Someone simply had to examine the numbers, identify the inconsistencies and ask why plants were not purchasing on the most favourable terms already available under their contracts.

This is precisely the kind of administrative failure that repeatedly inflates the cost of government. Small inefficiencies become entrenched because nobody is required to challenge established practice, and established practice eventually acquires the status of procedure. By the time someone finally asks a basic commercial question, consumers may have been paying the price for years.

The Rs380 million in projected annual savings may appear modest against the enormous financial problems of the power sector, but that misses the larger point. If one review of one procurement component can uncover savings without fresh investment, how many similar leakages remain buried elsewhere?

The Power Division is therefore right to extend this data-driven approach across the sector. Procurement of fuel, maintenance contracts, transmission costs, administrative expenditure and other pass-through items should all be subjected to the same scrutiny.

The objective should be simple: where public money or consumer tariffs ultimately absorb the cost, commercial decisions must be transparent, competitive and demonstrably efficient. The suggestion from a power plant representative that coal could instead be procured through competitive bidding also deserves examination on its merits rather than dismissal.

There is also a strong case for publishing the results of these reviews. Consumers who have endured repeated tariff increases deserve to know where avoidable costs are being identified, how long they existed, and what corrective measures are producing measurable savings.

Transparency would also create pressure on individual plants and regulators to explain procurement choices that depart from obvious commercial logic.

The Power Division deserves credit for spotting this particular inefficiency and acting on it. But a government should not have to congratulate itself for discovering that buying the same product more cheaply saves money. The real achievement will come when such scrutiny becomes routine enough that these discrepancies are caught before they become part of the bill.