Law minister's assurance?

The law minister on Wednesday assured of removing the controversial Section 57 of the amended Information Communication Technology Act, considered draconian by legal experts, free speech advocates and others. The fact, however, remains that the same draconian provisions of Section 57 of the ICT Act have already been inserted in the proposed Digital Security Act which experts and activists have unequivocally said too endangers the right of citizens to free speech.

In light of this, we wonder how the law minister is giving us such assurances, when the existing law in place is simply going to be replaced by another one which is equally, if not more so, considered a threat to the basic rights of citizens as enshrined in our constitution.

The proposed law, in fact, goes a step further and actually empowers the police to make arrests without warrants based on suspicion alone of an offence being committed. Such far reaching power to the police which allows the law enforcing agency to simply ignore the concept of 'presumption of innocence' — Article 11 under the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights — added with the controversial stipulations of Section 57 is an even greater threat, to citizen's right to dissent.

With that in mind, the law minister should explain why exactly it is that citizens should not be concerned about their right to free speech and democracy itself, given that their right to dissent is a basic tenet of our democracy.