TERRORISM AND THE LEGAL CHALLENGE: THE SAARC RESPONSE

Addressing cross-border terrorism in the 1980s exposed legal and diplomatic gaps across South Asia. This article analyzes how a regional response began to cohere around shared definitions, evidence standards, and procedures for cooperation. It explains why bilateral extradition treaties were insufficient when political offense exceptions and evidentiary thresholds diverged widely. The paper emphasizes the role of regional instruments to routinize mutual legal assistance: expedited rogatory requests, preservation of communication records, and standardized chain-of-custody rules. By fostering predictability, these measures reduced the space for safe havens without collapsing civil liberties safeguards. The article maps early steps toward convergent lists of predicate offenses and notes the importance of judicial liaison networks and prosecutors’ roundtables. It also warns that durable cooperation depends on firewalling partisan uses of terror labels and ensuring independent review. The core finding is that legal interoperability—not only security operations—was the decisive lever for credible regional counterterrorism.

The body reconstructs typical failure modes: delays triggered by translation, incompatible evidentiary rules, and inconsistent witness protection. It then details practical fixes trialed in South Asia: model extradition clauses narrowing political-offense exceptions; fast-track channels for urgent warrants; and MLA templates specifying timelines, formats, and authentication standards. Case illustrations show how synchronized arrests and mirrored indictments increased the probability of successful prosecutions while respecting due process. The article assesses civil-liberties concerns, proposing oversight via inspectorates, reporting to parliaments, and judicial review of cooperation requests. It closes with a blueprint for incremental deepening: common training curricula for investigators and prosecutors, digital registries of designated groups and individuals, and review conferences to update definitions as tactics evolve. The argument throughout is that law, procedure, and trust are the quiet infrastructure of effective counterterrorism, and that SAARC’s contribution was to make that infrastructure visible and repeatable.