LAHORE, Oct 5: Reacting to the grant of bail by the Lahore High Court to an accused in a zina case, eminent lawyers and rights activists say the courts in Pakistan have not always done enough to strictly enforce the culture of human dignity and to ensure privacy of citizens.

These, they hold, are inviolable as ordained by the faith and guaranteed by the 1973 Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several international charters.

A division bench had on Wednesday accepted the bail of an accused on the ground that the FIR against him was registered on the complaint of a lumberdar who stated that he had seen the commission of zina through the doors of a portion of his house rented out to the accused. The court observed that the 1973 Constitution guaranteed privacy of citizens which was inviolable. The court also observed that a criminal case registered in violation of the privacy had no validity as no one, even police, could be permitted to violate the privacy even for the purpose of restoring order and curbing crime.

Chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan Asma Jahangir welcomed the verdict, but said the court should have taken notice of the fact that the police registered the case on the complaint of the lumberdar stating that he had seen through the door of the room that zina was being committed.

Ms Jahangir said superior courts had given a number of decisions on the basis of constitutional provisions in order to curb the abuse of authority by police who were not supposed to extract evidence by force. She said many fundamental rights were enforceable, subject to certain legal limitations.

The only right which neither had limitations nor conditional to other laws, was the provision that human dignity and the sanctity of home were not violable and that there should be no compromise on this right, she said, adding that police could enter a house only after producing a search warrant issued by a magistrate of competent jurisdiction.

Mohammad Ramzan Chaudhry, Chairperson of the Pakistan Bar Council Human Rights and Free Legal Aid Committee, said that courts had done a lot to enforce human rights, but much remained to be done to ensure that it made an impact on society.

“We need a culture in which people themselves take care of others’ rights and consider such offences as evil,” Mr Chaudhry said, adding that the judiciary was under a huge national obligation to decide cases, also keeping in view the social aspects.

He said police had emerged as a major violator of human rights and the government and the judiciary were required to take a much serious view of police abusing their authority.

President of the Supreme Court Bar Association Malik Mohammad Qayyum said Pakistan’s constitution was the second in the world which had a unique distinction of incorporating the provision of inviolability of home and dignity of people. Ireland was the other country which had this right in its constitution. However, he said courts had not done enough to permeate as a culture the sanctity of this most fundamental right.

A former judge of the Lahore High Court, Malik Qayyum said that police and other law-enforcement agencies were found to be mostly responsible for disregarding human rights with impunity. This factor was largely attributed to the feudal society and ruling classes which had been asking police to augment their political agenda, he said, adding that successive governments also had failed to create awareness about fundamental rights.

Finance Secretary of the Lahore High Court Bar Association Rabiyya Bajwa said that courts which had been setting free detained brick kiln workers were yet to get criminal cases registered against kiln owners responsible for illegal detentions which, in some cases, extended to years.