Editorial
New move to debar trial court convicts from polls
It will fill a major legal lacuna in present conditions
THE new move by the caretaker government towards ensuring that individuals convicted of criminal offences by a trial court are barred from taking part in elections sounds reasonable and acceptable. And it is so because it fills a major lacuna in the legal process. The lacuna is that individuals sentenced by a trial court are free to take part in elections as long as their appeals before a higher court go on. We realise, of course, that there is a standard legalistic approach in such situations, where an individual is free to engage in political or other activity as long as all his means of legal appeal are not exhausted. With due respect to such legalities or interpretations of legality, we also notice that the realities in Bangladesh since the restoration of democracy in 1991 have been quite beyond the ordinary. During that period many corrupt individuals got elected because of the lengthy appeals process. Indeed, over the past few weeks, with elections to the city corporations and municipalities approaching, reports have appeared of a number of people charged with corruption filing nomination papers for the polls. The resultant concern among broad sections of people can only be imagined.
The point, therefore, is that for all the questions that may be raised about the projected new provisions in the Representation of People Order Ordinance 2008, it is the worries or fears of the nation about a return of criminal elements into the political process that need to be addressed. The move to keep individuals convicted by trial courts out of the electoral process relating to the parliamentary polls should therefore be seen as a way of preventing such misuse of the legal process. The immense public need to ensure a clean democratic political system surely outweighs every other consideration here. We would like to make it clear here that keeping people convicted by the trial court, even as their appeals are being heard by a higher court, out of political participation is well worth the effort, given that the national goal in these many months has been the creation of a society ready to turn its back on a system made sordid by criminality and corruption.
That said, we unequivocally agree (we cannot do otherwise, obviously) with the principle of the appeals process going on in the higher courts. If eventually convictions by the lower courts are overturned at the highest levels of the judiciary, let those initially barred from taking part in politics by such convictions be free to return to playing their due role in society. At this particular point, however, it is critically important that those convicted of corruption and other criminal offences by the lower courts do not find legal loopholes to make their way back into the centre of things. If they do, the entire effort to clean up the system will fall flat on its face.
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