PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court on Tuesday sought the minutes of a federal cabinet meeting that decided to ban the the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) in Oct last year.

A bench consisting of Justice Sahibzada Asadullah and Justice Aurangzeb Khan observed that if those minutes were sensitive in nature, they should be produced in a sealed envelope and that they wouldn’t be disclosed to anyone.

It later fixed March 25 for next hearing into a petition jointly filed by PTM founder Manzoor Ahmad Pashteen and nine other leaders against a ban on them as well as their rights movement.

The petitioners requested the court to declare illegal the ban on PTM under Section 11-B of the Anti-Terrorism Act and the petitioners under Section 11-EE.

Declares if those documents are sensitive, they’ll be kept confidential

They also sought the court’s orders for the federal government to remove PTM from the list of banned outfits in the First Schedule of ATA and their names from the ATA’s Fourth Schedule.

The petitioners requested the court to declare that sections 11-B and 11-EE, amended through the Anti-Terrorism (Amendment) Act, 2014, are in conflict with Article 10-A of the Constitution that guarantees the right to fair trial and due process of law.

They also sought orders for Section 11-D of the law, which deals with the keeping of an organisation under observation, to be read as a mandatory precursor to proscription under Section 11-B of the ATA.

Counsel for the petitioners Attaullah Kundi and Jehanzeb Mehsud contended that the federal government had banned the PTM, claiming the federal cabinet had approved it, but it neither made the cabinet’s decision public nor had it shared the grounds for ban with their clients.

Additional attorney general Sanaullah Khan pointed out that in accordance with the court’s orders, a summary for the PTM ban had been submitted along with the comments.

However, the bench observed that the summary was not present in the file.

The AAG opposed the petition and requested the bench to reject it for being non-maintainable.

He added that the ATA provided remedy to the petitioner but without availing the same he had approached the court.

The petitioners’ lawyers argued that while the AAG had been contending that the petitioners should first file review before the government instead of filing the instant petition and on the other hand they had not been provided grounds on which the organisation was proscribed.

They said that they should be provided minutes of the meeting of the federal cabinet that took the decision to ban the PTM.

However, the AAG pointed out that since the meeting minutes were sensitive documents, they couldn’t be handed over to the petitioners.

He added that the petitioners had already been provided with copies of the impugned order and the summary about the ban.

The counsel for the petitioners said that the PTM had organised the Pashtun National Jirga in Khyber tribal district from Oct 11 to Oct 13, 2024, to provide a platform to Pakhtuns to demand “justice and accountability,” but to their utter shock, the federal government banned their organisation on Oct 6.

They insisted that around 250 of PTM leaders were “proscribed” under Section 11-EE of the ATA, with their names placed in Fourth Schedule of the law.

The lawyers argued that an amendment made to the ATA in 2014 empowered the government to ban an organisation on ex parte basis without providing an opportunity of hearing to it, but that provision was unconstitutional and against the principle of natural justice.

Published in Dawn, March 12th, 2025