ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court on Friday asked the rulers to discontinue their opulent, monarch-like lifestyle and instead focus all their energies and resources on elevating the condition of the underprivileged and downtrodden people by providing them basic necessities of life.

A judgement, authored by Justice Dost Mohammad Khan, predicted a gloomy and dark future for the nation as well as for the country both financially and socially if the institutions vested with the responsibility of ending corruption and the special courts established to interpret corruption laws failed to invigorate a campaign against the malaise which has been eating into the very vitals of the state.

The judgement came on an appeal moved by one Imran Mohsin against the Jan 14, 2016, Islamabad High Court verdict rejecting his bail application.


Poor people will be forced to commit suicide if corruption is not discouraged


The Supreme Court, however, upheld the high court judgement.

The SC verdict observed that it was an admitted fact that destitute and hapless people of the country had been living an impoverished life due to inequalities in society because of the menace of corruption and corrupt practices that had spread to even the lowest tiers of society.

It said the way the scourge of corruption was metastasised into all vitals over the past few decades had left the institutions created to fight the bane of corruption, especially the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), with no choice to initiate specialised and expert training among their investigators and prosecutors. Such training should be developed in a way that should go hand-in-hand with the need of the hour because such offences come under white-collar crimes, a kind very difficult to detect by ordinary officers of the institutions, the judgement said.

Officials’ integrity

“It is high time that only honest officers equipped with a scientific and technologically advanced training should be employed in the institutions like NAB,” the verdict said, adding that it was the duty of the heads of such institutions to discipline their investigators and prosecutors by keeping an eye on them and minutely supervising their performance. Otherwise, it said, such heads of the institutions should be considered guilty of dereliction of duty.

The judgement said: “This is the need of the time because the embezzled money involved in the corruption runs in millions and billions (of rupees) and it is very easy for the offenders to offer bribery to buy the loyalty of the officers investigating the plundering of the money, especially from the national kitty.

“In the eyes of the law, such a case when happens causes more harm to the society than the actual offence of embezzlement and, therefore, it should entail serious punishment from the courts.

“It is the foremost duty of every ruler to guard the national exchequer from all attempts to loot and plunder by employing transparent mechanisms, otherwise the oppressed and disadvantaged people will be forced to commit suicide if the corruption is not discouraged at all levels of the society.

“Our motherland has not been gifted to us rather scores of people had to shed their blood and sacrificed with their lives to achieve a sovereign state. Thus the superior and lower courts should play a vibrant role in this regard.”

National tragedy

The judgement regretted that although people from all walks of life were in the forefront against the menace of corruption by raising their voice, unfortunately a majority of them avoided exercising the same principles in their daily life — a situation which was no less than a national tragedy.

Published in Dawn, August 27th, 2016

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