Babar for extension of higher courts' jurisdiction to tribal areas

Senator Farhatullah Babar has said jurisdiction of Supreme Court and High Court should be extended to tribal areas in accordance with the recently passed legislation. This he stated at a HRCP consultation here on the Interim Governance Regulation in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). He was of the view that women should be given their constitutional rights there, said a press release issued here on Friday.
He said the Regulation should be placed before the Parliament. Babar said there were two elephants in the room. One, keeping the FATA a black hole and other, pursuing disastrous policies of the past and allowing so-called good Taliban strut around in the guise of Aman Committees and other nomenclatures.
The FATA is a forbidden area for journalists, parliamentarians and members of civil society, he said.
Babar said until challenged by the Pushtun Tahaffuz Movement the tribal people could not enter their homes without obnoxious 'Watan Cards' and made to suffer humiliation and indignities at the security check posts.
For the first time an indigenous youth movement feeling fed up are publicly pointing fingers demanding freedoms, human rights and peace, he said.
The regulation claims to provide justice, peace and good governance' but how?
It dismisses jurisdiction of superior courts and bars civil courts from questioning anything done in Fata, he said.
Instead of courts justice will be provided by the DC who on basis of 'good reason to believe' can punish whole villages, seize property, bar people from travelling to settled areas, banish any one "dangerously fanatic" or has no "ostensible means of subsistence" or cannot give a "satisfactory account of himself".
Justice will be provided by a Council of Elders handpicked by the DC with no women in it. The DC also has powers to pardon any accomplices on becoming prosecution witness. The local governments do not even figure in the regulation, he added.
While the state itself is building barbed wire fence the regulation forbids people from building new villages or walled enclosures and anything within 120 yards of the centre of a road without permission.
Civil disputes will assigned to the Council of Elders or to an undefined Qaumi Jirga to settle them according to Rewaj without elaborating what Rewaj is, he said.