KARACHI, Aug 16: Former judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Justice Nasir Aslam Zahid, has said that no society deserves to be called civilized unless it is based on the supremacy of law.

This he said while delivering a lecture on the constitutional safeguards against violations of human rights. The occasion was organized by National Institute of Public Administration (NIPA) on “Human Rights” as part of the 74th advanced course in public management.

Nasir Aslam Zahid informed the participants that the Constitution of Pakistan provided safeguards against violations of human rights.

Zia Awan, president of the Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid (LHRLA), said that no cause was worthier than the cause of human rights.

He referred to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and informed that its article 1 clearly stated that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and as such should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”.

He said that in addition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Pakistan had signed and ratified a number of international human rights instruments such as the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the ILO Convention 182 and the SAARC Convention on Trafficking. But despite these protocols and conventions, he said, violent crimes against weak sections of the society continued unabated.

He said that according to the statistics collected by Madadgar, during the past six months, 651 women were murdered, 322 were raped, 425 were killed in the name of honour, 521 were injured and 645 were reported abducted from different parts of the country.—PPI