LAHORE, Dec 9: Human rights organisations and activists are critical of the Punjab government for failing to deliver on this all-important front.

Recording their impressions in connection with the World Human Rights Day which is falling on Sunday (today), veteran rights activist Abid Hassan Manto said the imposition of section 144 in Punjab was a glaring example of rights violation.

He also objected to the orders of the provincial authorities who declared that all public meetings and political rallies be held at the Minar-i-Pakistan with prior permission of the government.

Referring to several other human rights violations like ban on trade unions, he said these could not be highlighted because there was no political movement going on in the province.

Farooq Tariq of the Labour Party claimed that Punjab had the worst record of human rights abuse among all the provinces. “There are many hidden violations of human rights; one of them being the bonded labour.”

There were around 1.8 million kiln workers in Punjab and most of them were victims of bonded labour, he said, lamenting that the menace existed despite the Supreme Court ruling and Bonded Labour Abolition Act for its elimination.

He pledged to gather some 2,000 people at Simla Pahari on Sunday (today) to protest against the curse of bonded labour.

Tariq said economic exploitation was another aspect of deplorable state of human rights in Punjab. The minimum wages had been set at Rs4,000 a month but without any effective mechanism for its implementation.

Pakistan Bar Council Free Legal Aid Cell chairperson Chaudhry Ramzan said the situation in Punjab had been worsened by the police and other government institutions. The atrocities committed by the police towards people and the way well-off prisoners were facilitated in jails spoke volumes for human rights violation.

On the other hand, he said, Wasa, Sui gas and other public utilities used delaying tactics in providing connections to the people to mint money, but unfortunately there was no check on them.

A spokesperson for Asr, an NGO working for women’s rights, claimed that human rights situation in Punjab had not improved and the fact was reflected by the rising graph of state crimes, exploitation of women and their murder in the name of honour.