As Pakistan continued to face challenges to its internal security in 2011, the year also saw serious human rights violations by law enforcement personnel.On May 17 police and Frontier Corps officials gunned down three women and two men at a checkpoint in Kharotabad, Balochistan. Authorities initially said they had been Chechen suicide bombers in possession of explosives, but it later emerged that they were unarmed civilians.

Then, on June 8, Rangers personnel shot dead 22-year-old Sarfraz Shah, claiming that he had been armed and looting visitors at a Karachi park. But footage taken by chance showed an unarmed Shah pleading before being shot twice at point-blank range.

Both incidents sparked outrage. In August an anti-terrorism court handed down a death sentence to the Rangers serviceman who pulled the trigger and life terms to five paramilitary soldiers and the civilian who had accused Shah of robbery.

In the Kharotabad case, though, the process of accountability has been far less than satisfactory. While the Balochistan government sacked two policemen (the city police chief of the time having already retired), no further action was taken. In October, the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Human Rights criticised the judicial report on the killings as being “non-professional”.

While these cases came to light because they happened to be caught on camera, unknown incidents of a similar nature are also likely to have occurred. It is essential that the state take steps to sensitise law enforcement personnel on the limits of their authority and the possibility of human rights abuses in Pakistan’s fraught security landscape. Rights organisations allege that in some parts of the country, the security apparatus is carrying out programs of extrajudicial detentions and killings. Such accusations gain greater traction when those tasked with enforcing the law become persecutors, eroding public trust and compromising civilian security.

— Hajrah Mumtaz is a Dawn staffer