ISLAMABAD   -   The Senate Standing Committee on Interior Friday approved the Mutual Legal Assistance (Criminal Matters Amendment) Bill in a move to fulfill the conditions of Financial Action Task Force, the global anti-money laundering and counter terror financing watchdog, to get Pakistan’s name off its Grey List. 

The opposition lawmakers of two major parties, Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) opposed the bill saying that the piece of legislation was contrary to fundamental rights of citizens and a violation of the Constitution as well.

After around an hour-long threadbare discussion on the draft bill and finding that the opposition was not ready to support it, the Chairman Committee Senator Mohsin Aziz put the bill for voting. The committee passed it with seven votes of the ruling alliance while four opposition senators voted against it. 

The PML-N lawmakers Azam Nazeer Tarar and Rana Maqbool Ahmed and PPP Senators Moula Bux Chandio and Shahadat Awan voted against the bill that was referred by the upper house to the committee on June 18. The house will not take up the bill for final voting on it. After the Director-General FATF Secretariat Khawaja Adnan Zaheer briefed the committee about bill, the Parliamentary Leader of PML-N in the House Senator Tarar said that the law allowed confiscation of any property, obtained or derived from the offence of money laundering, of a citizen much before his conviction. He said that all laws in Pakistan except Control of Narcotics Substance Act (CNSA) didn’t allow pre-conviction confiscation of property. “With this, some complication will arise in future,” he said adding that the amendments proposed in the bill would apply to all laws related to tax evasion and anti-terrorism etc.