PESHAWAR, April 7: Terming the referendum a blow to the democratic foundations of the state, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said the regime’s prescription is fraught with several hazards for the basic human rights of the people.

In a press release, issued here on Saturday by HRCP Chairperson Afrasiab Khattak and Secretary-General Hina Jillani, the commission said : “As an organisation committed to the defence of the basic human rights in Pakistan, the HRCP finds in General Pervaiz Musharraf’s address of Friday, April 5, a grave threat to these rights. The tone and tenor of the address are as alarming as its substance, as they smack of a determination to contemptuously   dismiss enlightened public opinion, and of pushing the country again into the abyss of absolute rule. They also do violence to the people’s aspiration for self-government, which they have demonstrated through several struggles against dictatorship in the past decades.”

It added: “While rationalising his ill-concealed ambition in an over 90 minutes harangue on his regime’s claims of achievements, Mr Musharraf has repudiated both logic and history by denying the people’s right to change any policies, however sound they might have appeared at a given time. Apart from the fact that some of the regime’s so-called achievements are highly questionable, and nothing has been said about the military rulers’s role in raising the monster of obscurantist militancy, the whole argument is based on self-serving assumptions.

No amount of development or economic growth can justify denial of people’s sovereign rights just as progress under colonialism did not legitimise that obnoxious order.”

The commission claimed that the proposed referendum enjoyed the sanction of neither the country’s basic law nor the generally accepted principles applicable to such exercises.