The Statute That Can No Longer Correct Itself

The Punjab Animal Health Act, 2019 (Act XXXII of 2019) is the best animal health drafting in Pakistan, and saying so is not faint praise. It was introduced as Bill No. 14 of 2019, published at Lahore on 22nd April 2019, passed by the Provincial Assembly of the Punjab on 25th November 2019, assented to by the Governor of the Punjab on 10th December 2019 and published in the Punjab Gazette (Extraordinary) of 13th December 2019 at pages 2627 to 2634; since Section 1(3) provides that it shall come into force at once, therefore it has been in field from that day and needed no commencement notification. It repealed, within the province, the Glanders and Farcy Act, 1899 and the Dourine Act, 1910. It schedules 33 diseases, among them anthrax, avian influenza, brucellosis, rabies and foot and mouth disease. It supplies zoonotic notification, laboratory biosafety, quarantine, movement control and culling powers which most of the provincial corpus lacks entirely.

Six years on, it carries four defects which no amount of good administration can cure, because each of them is a defect in the text. One of them can no longer be corrected by the Act’s own machinery at all.

A cross-reference that points at the wrong section

Section 10(1) is the notification duty, and it is a good one. In every controlled area a report that an animal is infected with a scheduled disease must be made to the local veterinary officer by the person in charge of the animal, by every veterinary practitioner called to treat it or to whom it is brought, by every veterinary assistant visiting it, and by every person certifying animal health in a public or private slaughter house.

Section 11(3) then requires anyone who learns that an animal is affected by rabies to notify the nearest police officer with all practicable promptness, and exempts from that duty a person “having a duty to report the existence of disease under section 7(1)”.

Section 7 is the compulsory vaccination provision. It imposes no duty to report anything.

The duty to report sits in Section 10(1), so the exemption in Section 11(3) has no subject matter whatever; on the face of the enacted text it exempts a class of persons which the statute does not create. The defect was carried out of the Bill and into the Act without correction, and a veterinary practitioner who reads Section 11(3) literally cannot tell whether the rabies duty binds him or not.

The power to cure it lapsed in December 2021

Section 28 is the power to remove difficulties, and it was exercisable only within two years of the enactment. The Act came into force on 13th December 2019. That power hence expired in December 2021, and since it expired before anybody noticed the defect, therefore the wrong cross-reference in Section 11(3) can now be cured by one route only, which is an amending Act of the Provincial Assembly of the Punjab.

A statute drafted to be self-correcting has outlived the correction period with the error still in it.

The trap in the numbering

Anyone citing this Act from a secondary source should count the sections himself. Sections 1 to 22 of the Act carry the clause numbers of the Bill unchanged, but four sections absent from the Bill were inserted as Sections 23 to 26, being the Tribunal, cognizance of offence, appeal and indemnity, and everything after them moved down by four. The power to amend the Schedule, which stood as clause 23 in the Bill, is Section 27 of the Act; the power to remove difficulties is Section 28; the rule-making power is Section 29; the regulation-making power is Section 30; and the repeal is Section 31.

A reference to clause 27 as the repealing provision is therefore a reference to the Bill as introduced and not to the law in field, and it will be wrong in a pleading.

Ten times the fine for paperwork

Section 6(2) punishes a breach of the traceability rules with a fine up to Rs 200,000, the heaviest penalty in the Act. Section 16(2) punishes a breach of the animal welfare regulations with a fine up to Rs 50,000. Section 20 punishes the throwing of an infected carcass into a river, lake, canal or water channel with a fine up to Rs 15,000 on a first offence and up to Rs 25,000 thereafter. Section 22 punishes a residual contravention, or the obstruction of a competent officer, with a fine up to Rs 10,000.

And Section 21(2), which is the laboratory containment provision, requiring every institution or laboratory working on vaccines, sera, diagnostics or chemotherapeutic drugs for a scheduled disease to ensure that the causative organism does not escape, punishes non-compliance with a fine up to Rs 20,000 or six months’ imprisonment or both, with suspension of a commercial manufacturing licence for up to one year.

A paperwork breach of the traceability rules attracts ten times the fine of releasing a pathogen from a laboratory. That is not a drafting nicety. Where a scheduled disease is zoonotic, and the Schedule names anthrax, avian influenza, brucellosis and rabies among the thirty-three, the escape which the fine of Rs 20,000 addresses is an escape into the human population, and hence the ranking needs serious reconsideration.

None of these penalties attracts the prohibitory clause of Section 497(1) of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1898, so bail is the rule in every case.

One officer holds the key to the whole penal scheme

The four sections which the Bill did not contain create a difficulty of their own. Section 23 makes every offence under the Act exclusively triable by the Tribunal constituted under Section 38 of the Punjab Livestock Breeding Act, 2014 (XIII of 2014), proceeding under the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898 as if it were a court of sessions. Section 24 then provides that the Tribunal shall not take cognizance except on the complaint of the Deputy Director Livestock concerned. Section 25 allows an appeal to the Honourable Lahore High Court within thirty days, and Section 26 indemnifies officers of the Livestock and Dairy Development Department for anything done in good faith.

Since cognizance is confined to the complaint of one livestock officer, therefore neither a health authority which learns of a zoonotic escape, nor a District Health Officer, nor a private person whose herd or whose family is exposed, may set the criminal process in motion; and the laboratory containment offence under Section 21(2), already the fourth of five in the ladder of fines, depends for its enforcement upon that officer choosing to complain to a Tribunal borrowed from a breeding statute.

What the amendment should carry

In the light of the above, it is urgently required that the Provincial Assembly of the Punjab pass a short amending Act doing five things.

First, substitute “section 10(1)” for “section 7(1)” in Section 11(3), which is now the only way that error can be reached. Secondly, insert in Section 10 a reciprocal duty upon the Chief Veterinary Officer to notify the District Health Officer and the National Institute of Health within a fixed period of the laboratory confirmation of a scheduled zoonotic disease, since the report at present climbs the livestock department and stops there, which is the same broken joint I have described in writing on avian influenza. Thirdly, raise the Section 21(2) penalty above the Section 6(2) penalty, so that the ladder reflects the harm rather than the administrative convenience. Fourthly, amend Section 24 to permit cognizance also on the complaint of the health authority of the district concerned. Fifthly, insert a compensation provision for animals culled under Section 21(3) or under an eradication area notification, because a power to cull unaccompanied by a duty to compensate produces silence and not surveillance.

The Punjab did the hard part in 2019, and did it better than the Federation has yet done it. What remains is a page of amendments, four of which are corrections rather than policy. Very unfortunately, the one provision which would have allowed the department to make them without troubling the Assembly is the very provision which has lapsed.