ISLAMABAD, Aug 30: Several hundred people in Pakistan have disappeared, apparently taken into detention in connection with the war on terrorism, the human rights group Amnesty International said on Wednesday.
So-called enforced disappearance has long been a problem in strife-torn countries such as Nepal and Sri Lanka, but new patterns have emerged in South Asia related to the war on terrorism, such as the Pakistani cases, it said.
“Whilst many of those have eventually been acknowledged as being held in Guantanamo Bay, others are believed still to be held in Pakistani detention although their precise whereabouts remain unknown,” the rights group said.
“South Asia has a history of enforced disappearances, with tens of thousands of people going missing over past decades in countries such as Nepal and Sri Lanka,” Amnesty International’s deputy Asia director, Catherine Baber, said in a statement.
“It is very disappointing to see countries such as Pakistan join in the trend that one would hope would be declining,” she said.
In Nepal, where Maoist rebels have battled government forces for the past decade, a government committee is investigating more than 600 cases of enforced disappearance. But activists say more than 1,000 are unaccounted for, the rights group said.
Maoist rebels are believed to have abducted thousands of people in Nepal and more than 330 people are still missing, it said.
The United Nations urged the Nepali government on Wednesday to clarify the fate of hundreds of missing.
Sri Lanka, where ethnic Tamil rebels began a war for a separate state in 1983, has one of the highest levels of unresolved enforced disappearance in the world, it said, though it did not give an estimate of the number of cases.
Up to 10,000 enforced disappearances have been reported in the Indian-controlled Kashmir, it said.
Ms Baber said people should be detained lawfully. “People should be arrested and detained according to the law, not forced into a van in the middle of the night and swept off to an anonymous detention centre where they risk torture and further abuse,” she said.
Individuals should have the right to challenge their detention, to see a lawyer of their choice and talk to their families, she said.
—Reuters
