EDITORIAL: On Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan’s bidding, a recent order of the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on missing persons was presented in the federal cabinet’s meeting on February 2, 2021. IHC Chief Justice (CJ) Athar Minallah in his judgment on the issue had stated that the PM and the government could be held responsible for their failure to protect the constitutionally-guaranteed rights of citizens, since the buck stops at the top. The judgment went on to state that enforced disappearance is the most heinous crime and intolerable in a society governed under the Constitution (or, one might add, any society). The judgment related to a petitioner whose son went missing in 2015 and despite the poor father’s running from pillar to post, no trace of the man could be found. Of course this is the disconcerting pattern of almost every case of missing persons that finds its way to the courts. The basic reason for this injustice is the embedded impunity enjoyed by the security services, widely believed to be the authors and practitioners of these heinous acts. The IHC CJ did not confine himself to the current PM and government, but sought the assistance of the Attorney General for Pakistan (AGP) to submit a list of all the PMs and federal ministers who held office since 2015. The AG was further asked to inform the court why exemplary costs may not be imposed on all those who may be declared responsible for the failure of the state to give a satisfactory explanation for the disappearance of the petitioner’s son. In short, the IHC CJ has put the current and past governments since 2015 on notice in this case. If this becomes a legal precedent, a veritable Pandora’s box may be opened up regarding the heinous practice of enforced disappearance from its early beginnings about 20 years ago, seemingly justified by the security agencies as necessary to combat fundamentalist terrorism generally as well as the nationalist insurgency in Balochistan. The practice has reaped hundreds if not thousands of people missing, and from its early avatar of the ‘kill and dump’ policy in Balochistan that has delivered many dead bodies drilled with bullet holes and bearing marks of torture, it has by now spread all over the country. Enforced disappearance not only threatens the life and well-being of the missing, it has proved a heart- rending torture for the families and near and dear ones of the ‘disappeared’, whose wails and cries for news of their loved ones and pleas to try them in a court of law if they have committed any crime have gone unnoticed by the powers that be. The Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (COIED) set up in 2011 under former Justice Javed Iqbal who is the present chairman of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), has failed to provide justice to even the victims whose cases have been reported to it, which in any case seems an insignificant number compared with the extent of the problem. Nor has the COIED held even a single perpetrator of the illegal practice of enforced disappearance responsible or taken any action against the same who, as mentioned above, seem to enjoy an unbreachable impunity even before the courts. Many instances are by now part of the record that if and when the security agencies have had the admission wrung out of them by a court that a disappeared person is being held by them in some detention centre, the incarcerated person still cannot be confident of being charged before a court of law, released, or even allowed to meet his grieving family and loved ones.
It is good, if not encouraging, that PM Imran Khan has been shaken awake by the IHC verdict. His reported statement in the cabinet meeting that he did not want even a single person to be missing contrasts with the continuation of enforced disappearance during his over two years in office. Since the impunity in which the security services are cocooned is the heart of the problem, it will be a test of the PM’s rhetoric that he and the military are ‘on the same page’ whether he can penetrate this dark barrier. If not, his agreeing with and acceptance of the IHC verdict may become one more in a long list of promises un-kept.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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