LAHORE, Sept 1: Justice Mohammad Akhtar Shabbir of the Lahore High Court has held that curbing the liberty of a free citizen is an act which is not only unconstitutional but also contravenes the teachings of Islam which cannot be condoned in any circumstances.

Giving a detailed judgment in the writ petition, filed against the detention of Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the amir of the Jamatud Dawaa Pakistan, which the court accepted terming the Punjab Home Department’s detention order unconstitutional and illegal, Justice Shabbir remarked that if at all a person had to be detained, the detaining authority must substantiate with the help of formidable material evidence that his or her activities were prejudicial to the public peace and tranquillity. Besides, the criteria determined by superior courts for a preventive detention had to be met by the detaining authority by applying mind on the basis of concrete material evidence.

The court announced its short order on Aug 28 on the writ petition moved by Maimoona Saeed, the wife of the Dawaa chief, through advocate Nazir Ahmad Ghazi.

In the judgment, a copy of which was made available on Friday, the court observed that no-one could be deprived of his or her fundamental right of freedom merely on supposition or conjectures and if such a behaviour was adopted, detention orders could not be sustained by superior courts who were the custodian of the basic human rights as enshrined in article 9 and 10 of the constitution.

Referring to the principles laid down by superior courts, the judgment said that courts must be satisfied that the material before the detaining authority was so reasonable as to satisfy a reasonable person that the detention order was necessary. Another principle, the judgment said, the authority’s satisfaction must be established in each and every ground of detention. Even if one of the grounds for the preventive detention was bad or irrelevant, the whole order would be rendered invalid. Yet another principle was that the detaining authority must place the entire material before a court of competent jurisdiction and the court alone would decide if the ground of detention was genuine. Besides, the court must also be satisfied if the detention order was issued by an authority competent to do so under the law.

Justice Shabbir held that the Punjab Home Department met none of the legal requirements and, as such, all the four reasons listed in the detention order suffered from serious legal infirmity.