Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
HomeTop NewsParliament passes NAB amendment bill

Parliament passes NAB amendment bill

The NAB Amendment Bill has been approved by Parliament.

ISLAMABAD: The National Accountability (Amendment) Bill, 2023 was passed by a joint sitting of Pakistan’s parliament on Monday, despite President Arif Alvi’s refusal to give his assent to the bill. The bill was previously passed by the National Assembly and Senate in April, but the president returned it to parliament, urging lawmakers to reconsider the amendments due to pending legal challenges.
However, the joint sitting’s passage of the bill means that even without the president’s approval within 10 days, it will still be considered to have received assent. The amendments to the bill empower the chairman of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), including the examination of pending inquiries and the appointment of an acting chairman in the absence of the chairman.
During the proceedings, Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar presented the motion for seeking approval of the bill. He said that laws made during a dictator’s rule were now being used for political engineering and that NAB, under former chairman Javed Iqbal, was used for this purpose.

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He also highlighted that laws made during a dictatorship were being used for political engineering, and that the recent amendments were necessary to provide legal cover for the transfer of cases from the accountability courts to other courts, tribunals, and forums.
While there were calls for further amendments from some lawmakers, the law minister emphasized that parliament’s affairs should not be interfered with by other institutions, including the judiciary.
Jamaat-e-Islami’s Senator Mushtaq Ahmed called for some amendments to the law, but the house rejected those suggestions. Referring to the Supreme Court hearing on the NAB bill, the law minister said that no institution has the right to interfere in the parliament’s matters. The minister said that they have not interfered in any other institution’s jurisdiction so far and expect the same from the judiciary.

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