| 24 December 2004 | Friday | 11 Ziqa'ad 1425 |
Arbitrary dismissals
Cops and robbers
The government's decision to set up a national human rights commission to be headed by a retired judge of the Supreme Court will be greeted with mixed feelings by rights groups in Pakistan and abroad.
One says this because the government has failed to check gross rights violations that continue to take place in the form of honour killing, bonded and child labour, torture and custodial deaths, sectarian killings, victimization of political opponents and convictions handed down under a set of discriminatory laws or by the parallel jirga-panchayat system.
Back in 2001 General Musharraf had set up a commission headed by a senior judge on the status of women and promised to amend the blasphemy law. But the government has failed to implement the commission's recommendations regarding the repeal of the Hudood ordinances and also withdrawn the amendments that were meant to minimize the abuse of the blasphemy law.
Its own law on honour killing, which was passed by parliament last October, has left much to be desired, with the accused still having the protective cover of the Qisas and Diyat law. The latter calls for honour killing to be treated as a matter between the parties concerned and not as a crime against the state.
Not only has the government dragged its feet with regard to the repeal or amendment of such discriminatory laws, it has itself been guilty of human rights violations. According to Amnesty International, hundreds of people, among them Pakistanis, Arabs and other foreigners, suspected of being Al Qaeda activists have been arrested and held without due process in Pakistani prisons or handed over to the US.
Arbitrary detentions and harassment of political opponents have also continued unabated. The passage of the controversial 17th Amendment to the Constitution and the promulgation of the Legal Framework Order under which people's sovereignty as represented by parliament has been subjected to the discretion of the president, who also happens to be the army chief, is another sore point.
Parliament's powers have been further curtailed by the formulation the National Security Council. The two measures also affect provincial autonomy as guaranteed by the Constitution.
The government has also chosen not to appeal against the Lahore High Court's decision earlier this month to reinstate the death penalty for children and to abolish juvenile courts which were ordered to be set up under the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance of 2000.
Besides these failings on the part of the government, the existence of a parallel justice system in the form of tribal jirgas and rural panchayats is an affront to legal and judicial norms.
Illegal sentencing like gang rape as punishment, as ordered by a Meerwala Jatoi panchayat in 2002 and the lynching of a young man in a Faisalabad village at the instigation of a priest the same year, are but recent examples of abhorrent tribal traditions.
The existence of private jails in the rural hinterland, which in reality are torture cells run by influential feudal lords, and the practice of trading off young girls as part of dispute settlements between feuding tribes are all abominable social evils that militate against the values of civil society.
Unless the official human rights commission that the government is now contemplating is geared towards effectively addressing these issues, it will have little utility.
Arbitrary dismissals
One act of political engineering leads to another. Four Sindh districts - Mirpurkhas, Larkana, Dadu and Jacobabad - were divided, so the PPP nazims of the four districts could no longer remain in office.
Now they have been removed. The real reason behind the decision thus appears to be to strengthen the ruling PML-MQM coalition's chances at the local body polls scheduled for next year.
The Sindh government's defence is that since the four districts in question have had their boundaries redrawn, the nazims thus affected have lost their electoral mandate. The re-drawing itself remains a subject of controversy with many quarters suggesting that the government has done this to chip away at the voting base of the opposition PPP.
The provincial adviser on local government has said that all legal formalities were fulfilled before the decision was taken. But the nazims were not served with a notice nor a committee duly constituted by the chief election commissioner set up to determine the question of the nazim's tenure.
Both are requirements under Clause 161 of the Sindh Local Government Ordinance of 2001. In addition, Clause 152 lists 19 qualifications whose violation can lead an incumbent to be removed from office. In this context, the whole exercise, first of carving new districts and then of sacking the four nazims, is a politically motivated act.
If no mala fide intent was involved, why were not the nazims served with notices and given a chance to present their point of view, as provided for under the 2001 ordinance? It is not that devolution is working wonderfully well, but at least there is some semblance of local government and the local people have accepted it for what it is worth.
For the Sindh chief minister and his coalition partners to sacrifice all that at the altar of political expediency is most regrettable. The wiser option would have been to wait and hold polls to determine the tenability of the nazims' mandate.
Cops and robbers
The murder of four people in two separate incidents of armed robbery in Lahore and the break-in at a Karachi bank on Monday speak of the precarious law and order situation in our big cities.
Incidents such as these are becoming common occurrences, with passers-by, motorists and the business people often being the target. The deaths in the Lahore incidents, one of them occurring at a petrol pump and the other by the roadside, are said to have taken place as a result of resistance put up by the victims.
The break-in at the Karachi bank was the handiwork of a security guard posted at the branch. The latest incident comes in a series of such acts involving security guards that have taken place in the city over the past few months.
This should be cause for alarm for the law enforcement agencies, which have failed miserably in tracking down the culprits involved in such robberies. Such acts also cast doubts over the prevalent practice of farming out security to the private agencies, which itself is a reflection of people's lack of confidence in our police.
Armed robberies are no petty thefts. They are premeditated and carefully planned acts of crime that often result in huge monetary losses and may also involve murder, as in the case of the latest Lahore robberies.
The spread of such organized crime in our big cities points to a complete breakdown of intelligence and law enforcement machinery. That most robbers are able to get away with such crime has instilled a general sense of insecurity among citizens and belies the tall claims made to the contrary by the police high-ups and ministers.
Surely, the concentration of police personnel on providing security to the VIPs is part of the problem which deflects the police force from performing its regular duties.
If the existing level of security protocol for the VIPs is to continue, the government would do well to form a separate force for the purpose instead diverting regular police from their normal duties. Lack of security at public places is a real problem in our big cities that needs to be addressed in all seriousness.