Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman said Thursday that the laws of National Accountability Bureau (NAB) were against the universal principles of justice under which a citizen was arrested and asked to prove his innocence despite the fact the responsibility of proving accusation lay on the shoulders of the complainant, reported 24NewsHD TV channel.

While talking exclusively to 24NewsHD TV channel in Dera Ismail Khan, the JUI chief said that the citizens of Pakistan were oppressed under the black laws of the NAB for 22 years, but the international human rights organisations and the civilised world remained silent.

“[When] we introduced some reforms in the NAB laws and aligned them with the natural standards of justice and fairness, the PTI challenged these NAB amendments in the Supreme Court,” he said.

“The irony of the situation is that PTI’s former Punjab chief minister Usman Buzdar has requested that his cases be tried under the amended rules of the NAB while Nawaz Sharif’s ex-personal secretary Fawad Hassan Fawad has demanded that his cases be heard under the old rules of the NAB,” he pointed out.

“Similarly, the security agencies including police and counter-terrorism department (CTD) protect the lives, property and basic rights of the citizens, but in our country, the law-enforcement agencies take away citizens’ basic rights of movement and freedom,” he added.

“The way every citizen was a born criminal under the NAB laws, the law-enforcement agencies also do not care of the basic rights of the citizens,” he averred.