October 21, 2002	Monday	Sha’aban 14,1423

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PESHAWAR, Oct 20: The Peshawar Juvenile Court has sought the record of 31 under trial offenders from various subordinate courts.

It was learnt that the presiding officer of the court, Ziauddin Khattak, who is also the Peshawar district and sessions judge, issued the directives to the concerned civil judges cum judicial magistrates directing them to send the cases of the 31 juvenile offenders of law to the court as under the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance, 2000, the juvenile court has the exclusive jurisdiction to deal with their cases.

The court issued the directives on an application carrying a list of 31 young offenders, filed by Dost Legal Aid Cell, a project of the Dost Welfare Foundation.

Though the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance was promulgated in 2000, the NWFP government has not established the courts under the law and finally the Peshawar High Court delegated the powers of juvenile courts to all the district and sessions judges across the province in April this year.

Under section 4 of the law no other court could exercise jurisdiction in cases of juvenile offenders except the juvenile courts.

Thirteen of the 31 offenders have been in prison on charges of drug pushing. Two of the accused, Abdul Bari and Farhad, have been facing murder charges. Some of the accused are facing charges under the Arms Ordinance, whereas one of them, Ajmal Khan, is charged of kidnapping a minor boy.

The most youngest of the offenders in the Peshawar central prison is Jawed, who is 12. He was arrested on Oct 27, 2000, by the officials of Pishtakhara police station on charges of drug pushing.

He was charged under the Control of Narcotics Substance Ordinance, 1997, and has been facing trial in the court of judicial magistrate, Safiullah Khan.

The list only carries the names of the juvenile offenders lodged in central prison in the city, whereas many others are languishing, mostly in narcotics cases, in other prisons of the province specially in the Haripur central prison.

The presiding officer of the juvenile court has, to the date, disposed of 25 cases of the juvenile offenders and in most of the cases he had either released the offenders on parole or sent them to the borstal institution at the Haripur prison.