LARKANA, Dec 30: A one-day workshop titled ‘media and human rights’ was held under the auspices of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) on Sunday.

Prof Abdul Wahab, while addressing the session, elucidated that democracy had never been allowed to flourish in Pakistan. It is the establishment that had time and again interrupted it, and added that none of the governments had worked for the benefit of the people.

He said that the judiciary, the police, and other departments had collapsed and cited the examples of the Pakistan Railways, and Wapda among others.

He said that students had been in the forefront of the struggle for democracy but it lived only upto 1970, and added that the regimes of Field Marshall Ayub Khan and Gen Yahya Khan imposed numerous bars on the press and gagged it with the DPR and publication laws.

He said that since 1986 upto the present it was the press that had developed, and added that the press was not being suffocated these days.

Prof Wahab opined that the press was free in the country now, and added that he had never witnessed such a degree of freedom of the press.