A welcome judgment

IN a country where the judiciary’s image has been anything but flattering, Friday’s decision by the Supreme Court comes as a breath of fresh air. Giving its judgment on a petition seeking to stay the proceedings of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Education on the marks enhancement issue, the apex court observed that it stood for the “supremacy of parliament and its committees”. While the privileges of the House were “matters determined judicially only by a court of law by exercising its power of judicial review”, the judgment by the three-man bench said, once the issue was settled the court had to “stay its hands off ungrudgingly”. The court was guided by the fact that the three organs of the state were required to “perform their functions and discharge their duties within the limits set by the constitution and the law”. If it had stayed the education committee’s proceedings, the judgment said, every citizen would “rush to court” if he was asked by a parliamentary committee to appear before it. The court hit the nail on the head when it said that the proceedings of a court or by a parliamentary committee were “not to be taken in a manner which may lead to unnecessary confrontation and chaos”.

Friday’s judgment by the Supreme Court serves to establish two points: the independence of the judiciary and the supremacy of parliament. Neither contradicts the other. While the National Assembly represents the people’s will and makes new laws or amends old ones to keep pace with social realities, the courts interpret the constitution and have the right to strike out a piece of legislation if it is perceived to be in violation of the constitution. During Pakistan’s formative phases the judiciary often took courageous decisions and stood up to the executive. Governor General Ghulam Mohammad’s decision to dissolve the constituent assembly in 1954 was declared unlawful by the Sindh Chief Court (later reversed by the Federal Court). Latter-day judges proved themselves to be spineless and upheld the murder of democracy by the generals. Friday’s decision should serve to shore up the judiciary’s image, since it concerns the country’s highest adjudicator.

Meanwhile the privilege motion by PML-N in parliament on Friday is an exercise in futility. The Supreme Court judgment annuls the earlier order by Justice Jaffery. Which means the committee on education is free to conduct its proceedings in the Dogar case. Let it do so. Why seek a fresh confrontation? Against this backdrop Chief Justice Dogar may be well advised to reconsider his position himself.

Poor vision

POVERTY means one thing to the poor and another to the government’s economic planners. For the poor, poverty means lifelong suffering — a life that has to be spent in squalor without adequate food, shelter, health facilities, education, clean water and so on. Most importantly, it means a life without any hope for change in their living conditions. But most planners usually look at poverty in terms of the exclusion of a section of population from economic activity — people who contribute little to growth but remain an unwanted burden on public resources. For them the poor represent just another ‘number’ in the economic data that is required to gauge the level of development a society has or has not achieved. Little wonder then that government ministers and officials usually avoid giving a human face to the issue of poverty.

So when the country’s top finance manager, Mr Shaukat Tarin, told a seminar in Islamabad last week that the number of poor had increased to 28 per cent from 24 per cent in 2005-06 he appeared to be saying this as a passing reference. Like the rest of the government officials and the rich of this country, he appeared more concerned at the falling growth and deteriorating macroeconomic and financial imbalances rather than the need to protect the poor and the vulnerable who are estimated by global lenders to constitute more than two-thirds of the population.

True, the increase in poverty over the last two years has been a result of global food and energy price shocks. However, responsibility also lies on the rulers who are not doing much to protect the poor from the impact of economic stabilisation policies and slowing growth, which officials acknowledge would push up to 7.5 million more people below the poverty line and render over one million others jobless in the almost two years to June 2010.

The removal of indirect food and energy subsidies is important to remove distortions in the economy, but it is equally important to help the low-income, poor and vulnerable groups who have really been affected by this move. The Rs34bn Benazir Income Support Programme aimed at providing cash support to 700,000 households and announced in the budget for the current financial year is marred by bureaucratic delays and alleged political favouritism. Unless the planners understand what poverty really means to the poor, they are unlikely to take measures which can be universally described as pro-poor.

Tobacco warning

MANY of the 25 million smokers in the country, as well as 1,200 youngsters who start smoking daily in Pakistan, know that smoking is bad for health. But they usually do not give much thought to its effects until these become evident after some years. They also tend to be less aware of effects other than lung cancer and heart diseases, e.g. effects on reproductive health, etc. In Pakistan, the general health warning ‘smoking is injurious to health’ first appeared in Urdu and English along the side of cigarette packs in 1980 as required by The Cigarettes (Printing of Warning) Ordinance, 1979. In recent years, particularly after a 2002 amendment in the ordinance, the more specific warning ‘smoking causes lung cancer and heart diseases’ is prominently displayed at the top of the pack on the front and back. But these messages lack the persuasive power of larger, more colouful pictorial health warnings which many countries have introduced.

Studies comparing cigarette-warning labels used in different countries have concluded that text-based health messages are less effective at directing the attention of smokers to health risks or motivating smokers to quit than colourful graphic or pictorial images. Some countries even require inserts about how to quit smoking and include the quit-smoking hotline number. Malaysia and India, which are scheduled to introduce pictorial health warnings on cigarette packs early next year, are the latest additions to a growing list of countries which are determined to present a clear picture to their smokers about the hazards of smoking.

We ratified in 2004 the WHO-sponsored Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which encourages the use of health warnings through pictures or pictograms. Also under the federal ministry of health’s Tobacco Control Initiative (2007-2012), the inclusion of pictorials and increase in space for health warnings are amongst the measures in the strategic action plan. It is high time we implement the provisions of the FCTC and the TCI with the help of all concerned in the public and private arena, including non-governmental organisations. Doing so will enable us to take a big step towards a 100 per cent smoke-free society where smoking in public and workplaces is totally prohibited, something which 17 states in the world have already done.

OTHER VOICES - Indian Press

Terror laws: some questions remain

The Asian Age

THE UPA government … has introduced two bills in parliament. One aims to establish a National Investigating Agency … to deal with terrorism and related offences, the other to tighten procedures to aid prosecution and trial by amending the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. …

News reports suggest that the NIA cannot begin investigating a case on its own. It appears that the first step is to be taken by the state government where a terrorist crime may have occurred. The state in question will have to ask the centre for the NIA to be pressed into service. It is far from clear if states will approach the centre … State governments are known to guard their turf jealously. Since law and order is a state subject, they have thwarted efforts in the past, irrespective of their political colour, to create an all-India agency to deal with terrorism.

…In bringing an amendment to the UAPA … the government has done well to allow for the admission of communications intercepts as evidence. This is a much-needed reform, although there is a downside to it, theoretically speaking. It has also shown wisdom in not throwing the onus of proving innocence on the accused, for that amounts to an inversion of civilised jurisprudence.

…Effective and tighter laws are needed to fight the menace of terrorism, but laws are not everything. A lot depends on the state of repair of the intelligence services and the investigating machinery. …Part of the trouble in India is that even existing laws have not been put to effective use on account of a creaking administrative machinery…. — (Dec 19)

Removing the chaff

The Sangai Express

…[T]HE people of Manipur have been hearing of late … reports of armed police personnel involvement in bomb threats at petrol pumps to demand money, snatching of mobile phones and looting of people at gunpoint….

[I]f there is any truth in these reports of the presence of unscrupulous elements in the police department … then it is really unfortunate…. Manipur is today passing through a very critical stage where its people dare not venture out … after nightfall or walk alone on [the] streets and … in secluded areas….

In such a situation, what would be the impact of … reports [about] the presence of criminal elements in the police organisation on the psyche of the people who should be feeling safer if they come across policemen….

It does not mean that all personnel in the police department … are tainted. There are many dedicated ones who have done exceptional work for the welfare of the people.

But like the old adage of ‘one rotten grain spoiling the entire rice basket’, [the] tarnishing [of] the image of the entire police department by … a handful of irresponsible personnel is indeed sad. Allowing them to remain unbridled would only … keep people … from trusting police personnel.

To prevent this from happening, the higher authorities of the police department should put on their thinking caps and … initiate [the] necessary steps to remove the chaff from the grain. …So no stone should be left unturned to save the reputation of the police department and remove the chaff from the grain while there is time. — (Dec 16)

Human rights & foreign policy

NOT that Bernard Kouchner had lacked enemies. Nevertheless after his troubling statement suggesting that human rights issues could be an impediment to his work, the French foreign minister can now only look forward to seeing that list growing.

To be honest, the comment has caught unawares Kouchner’s friends and foes alike. It comes from a man who himself has been, for nearly half a century now, an indefatigable warrior for human rights. Then he had the cheek to do this, retort furiously his detractors, on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, worse, in the country which considers itself the birthplace of the concept. The censorious, self-righteous crowd just can’t believe its ears.

Senior readers will remember Bernard Kouchner’s black and white photographs in Time and other news magazines, way back in the 1960s, shaking hands with the likes of Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro. The slight and sprightly young revolutionary with his characteristic bob of blond hair, once he had finished his medical studies, founded in 1971 the charity organisation Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) and eight years later Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), both well-known today in the non-French speaking world by the informal, expedient sobriquet, ‘French doctors’.

He once again drew plaudits from his admirers, and sneers from what had by then already grown into a sizeable crowd of adversaries, when in 1992 footage was repeatedly telecast over all French networks showing Kouchner carrying sacks of rice on his back for the Somali refugees. “This is too much!” cried his critics indignantly.

During the heat of the war in the 1980s Kouchner had crossed the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan a number of times, bringing medical succour to the suffering, among other things. He made one last trip as a humanitarian worker when the war had just finished. His shalwar-kameez, flowing beard and the woollen Afghan cap however failed to impress Mullah Omar and Kouchner was dryly thanked for his contribution and informed that his job was over and that he did not need to come back any more.

Little did the Taliban leader know that while he himself would be hiding, perhaps for the remainder of his days, in the mountains, the French doctor was to become the foreign minister of his country and was to routinely visit Afghanistan every now and then.

If many of his former friends, today embarrassed by their receding hairlines and pot bellies, hate Bernard Kouchner that is perfectly understandable too. At 69, he still sports the same bob of boyish blond hair and a teenager’s waistline.

But, more seriously, Kouchner’s controversial remark also came in the wake of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s encounter with the Dalai Lama in Poland, something bitterly criticised by the Chinese leaders who also threatened to end the tens of billions of dollars a year worth of trade deals with France.

Kouchner had already angered his Socialist Party colleagues who are still to get over from the ignominy of his accepting the offer of foreign minister’s job from their arch-enemy Nicolas Sarkozy. He did that once again in a newspaper interview in these words: “One cannot define foreign policy as purely a human rights issue. While managing the affairs of a country one has to distance himself from a certain measure of naïveté.”

To make matters worse, Kouchner also offered his mea culpa by admitting it was an error on his part suggesting to President Sarkozy to appoint a junior minister exclusively to handle human rights.

Just imagine the horror of the situation in these contrite and politically correct times as the job was given to the Senegal-born Rama Yade whom Sarkozy had once introduced to President George Bush as “my Condoleezza Rice”!

While Rama Yade herself admitted that she was no simpleton to confound foreign policy with human rights, Hélène Flautre, a Green Party member of the European Parliament qualified Kouchner’s remarks as “scandalous” and “intolerable.”

Considered dispassionately however, all this is centuries-old polemics. For one country to interfere in the affairs of another under a moralising pretext is acceptable to one line of thinking exemplified by the concept of ‘right to intervene’ advanced as early as in 1625 by the Italian jurist Hugo Grotius but developed into a veritable political movement in 1979 by the French philosopher Jean-François Revel whose disciple Bernard Kouchner himself happens to be.

The question was most aptly raised by Prof Allan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987), an exceptionally articulate critique of modern intellectual trends, who had asked a somewhat troublesome opponent what he would have done, had he been a British administrator in India, to stop a widow from burning herself to death at the cremation ceremony of her dead husband.

The answer, “If I were British, I wouldn’t be in India in the first place” caused some laughter during the intellectual gathering, but Bloom thought the man had only succeeded in deflecting a direct question.

Bernard Kouchner has today learned the hard way, with his year-old experience as the head pilot of French diplomacy, that when you deal with a foreign country, it is a lot more than human rights that you have on your plate.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

Car industry bailout

THE White House has reluctantly decided to prop up America’s motor industry by providing $17.4bn of emergency funding to avert a disastrous collapse of Detroit’s leading car manufacturers.

President Bush used taxpayers’ money to provide a three-month financial reprieve for General Motors and Chrysler in return for swingeing wage cuts among factory workers which provoked immediate anguish among unions.

From an initial fund of $13.4bn, GM will get $9.4bn and Chrysler will receive $4bn. The treasury will make a further $4bn available to GM in February. Detroit’s third major firm, Ford, told the administration that it could get by without a handout.

Bush said without the money manufacturers faced the prospect of disorderly bankruptcy and liquidation. Experts believe the loss of one of Detroit’s “big three” would cause more than a million job losses among suppliers and contractors.

The decision ends a month of bitter political wrangling in which motor industry bosses shuttled between Detroit and Washington to plead for aid.

Congress failed to agree on a legislative rescue plan a week ago, leaving an executive order from the White House as the last hope.

The money will come from the government’s $700bn economic bailout fund intended to support struggling banks. But the money comes with tight strings attached, which angered Detroit politicians and the UAW car workers’ union.

Under the deal, GM and Chrysler must cut workers’ wages and benefits to the level of counterparts at Japanese manufacturers by the end of next year, a timetable which employees view as unfair. In a direct challenge to Bush’s authority, the UAW said it would appeal to president-elect Barack Obama to change the terms when he takes office next month. “While we appreciate that President Bush has taken the emergency action needed to help America’s auto companies weather the current financial crisis, we are disappointed that he has added unfair conditions singling out workers,” said the UAW president, Ron Gettelfinger.

His view was echoed by John Dingell, a congressman representing the car manufacturing city of Dearborn, who said: “It is irresponsible during a time of economic crisis for the White House to insist that workers take further wage cuts on top of the historic concession they have already made.”

The White House’s terms were put before carmakers late on Thursday and agreed in late-night discussions. They give the treasury significant involvement in day-to-day decisions at GM and Chrysler.

In return for the money, the firms must prove by the end of March that they are financially viable, with prospects for long-term profits.

They will have to sell their private jets, halt bonus payments to senior executives and seek government approval of transactions worth more than $100m. They must even tell the US treasury of any deviations from expenses policy on minutiae such as travel, Christmas parties and conferences.

GM’s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, said there had been little room for negotiation after a “stunning slowdown” in business.

The White House’s intervention came on the day Chrysler shut its manufacturing operation of 30 factories for an extended Christmas break of a month, temporarily laying off 46,000 workers.

— The Guardian, London