PESHAWAR, Mar 28: Special forest magistrates in the Provincially-Administered Tribal Areas are facing difficulties because the NWFP Forest Ordinance 2002 is not applicable over to those areas.

It was learnt that the civil judges-cum-judicial magistrates, who have been assigned powers of special forest magistrates, could not decide in Pata whether to conduct cases under the Forest Ordinance promulgated by the NWFP governor in 2002 or under the previous laws.

One of the magistrate told this correspondent that he had started hearing forest cases under the new ordinance as previous laws carried lesser penalties, adding that they were not adequate to curb illegal felling of trees.

Under Article 247 of the Constitution, an act of parliament or the provincial assembly or an ordinance was not applicable to Pata unless the governor, with the president's prior approval, issued a special notification for its extension.

An official of the Forest Department said that the promulgation of the Forest Ordinance was part of the Forestry Sector Reforms Project, started with the support of various donor agencies in the '90s.

Through the Forest Ordinance 2002, previous laws were repealed, including the Forest Act, 1927, the Hazara Forest Act, 1936, the Kohat Mazri Control Act, 1953, and the NWFP (Sale and Sawing of Timber) Act, 1996.

Under Section 93 of the Forest ordinance, all the offence cases punishable under the ordinance should be triable exclusively by the Forest magistrate or in his absence by a magistrate of first class duly empowered by the district and sessions judge concerned.

After August 2001, when the executive magistrates ceased to exist, the concerned district and sessions judges assigned powers of forest magistrates to different judicial magistrates especially in the forest areas of the province.

According to the Provincial Forest Resource Inventory, a study released in Jan 2000, 96.6 percent of the forested area in NWFP are concentrated in the nine districts of which 50.8 percent are in five districts situated in PATA.

These districts are Chitral, Upper and Lower Dir, Swat and Shangla. Rest of the 45.8 per cent of forests are concentrated in four Hazara districts. "The priority given by the government to conservation of forests can be judged from the fact that despite the passage of two years the Forest ordinance is yet to be extended to PATA, which is one of the major forest areas in the province, " said a forest magistrate.