THE High Court has delivered what we, and the general public, would consider an obvious judgment. Frankly, there couldn't have been any other. The verdict on the extortion case against Awami League chief Sheikh Hasina, quashing the case, must be welcomed as it upholds the due process of law and rejects any emergency measure. The court has indeed upheld a simple legal point that no law covers any offence committed before its enactment. What we really find baffling and difficult to understand is why the government failed to foresee the situation that has arisen now. The government's legal advisers should have been able to comprehend that the case would be untenable.

The wide-ranging implications of the HC judgment are not hard to see. There is no denying that for argument's sake even if we put Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia aside, there was corruption on an unprecedented scale in the country in the past, especially the five years of the four-party alliance rule. Many top politicians have been netted and some of them have already been convicted. Certainly, some of these elements are corrupt to the core against whom there are numerous charges of acquiring money and wealth illegally. They could have been tried under the existing laws of the country without creating any controversy. But the shoddy and poor handling of the legal process has created a situation where they might just begin to look like “victims” of legal harassment. These people are likely to get the benefit of the situation where the validity of the legal proceedings in the corruption cases might be questioned. We cannot but question the wisdom of the government's legal advisers who clearly failed to see in advance the weaknesses and limitations of applying the EPR, when the existing laws could have taken care of the corruption cases.

The lesson to be learnt from it is that any shortsighted attempt to take a shortcut in a legal matter might backfire and undermine the whole edifice of the justice system. Just one instance of the application of the EPR being legally untenable may bring a huge number of cases under question. The government should not have been in such a legal corner for which its own legal expertise has to be blamed.