Need for a new right: Rights of Destruction

Every civilized society is governed a specific set of rules and people exercise their freedom using their rights.  Rights simply can be referred as what people are allowed to do in the society, city or country. These rights cover different aspect of our routine life, which also includes “protests”.

With the passage of time, both people and the governing authorities tend to develop/incorporate more rights, which are in accordance with the needs of the people living in the society.

These rights set the limits in which the people can exercise the freedom. These limits in turn help the government to ensure that people are exercising their rights with in their approved limits. Any action, which is termed beyond the limits of the rights, is subject to the action.

Couple of months back, the oldest democracy in the world has exercised the same fundamental concept following the riots carried out by the protesters in their capital city. However, unfortunately here in Pakistan it does not happened in the same way. While the destruction of the public and private property by the masses/mobs during while utilizing their rights, dates back to the 70s era.

For last 15 years, the occurrence of such events has increased and more importantly, the damage made to the property by these actions has reached to alarming level. There is no specific demographic group, which is responsible for conducting these actions in country and people from different walks of the life and from different age groups participate in them.  What this depicts is that many in Pakistan prefer to express their opinion in such a manner.

Now they must be doing it right as no one ever questions or trials those who are responsible for carrying out such activities. Has the government ever trialed the ones involved in such riots? Is there any precedent in the history of the Pakistani judicial system, which is similar to the one we witnessed in United Kingdom couple of months back?

The answer I’m afraid is in negation. Therefore, I propose to add a new right, Rights for Destruction, which will allow the people in Pakistan to destroy the public and private property, during the protest.  Because when the adults perform such action and they unpunished, others will follow their footsteps.

The main inspiration of this writing came from the protests student held in different cities of Punjab.

Tags: laws in Pakistan, Pakistan Law, protests in Pakistan, Rights, Rights of Destruction

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=1235

Posted by Abdul Basit Abbasi on Oct 22 2011. Filed under Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry