With thousands of pending terror cases, Karachi tops the list

Karachi
Even without counting, Karachi leads the rest of the country by miles in terms of the number of cases being heard at its anti-terrorism courts.
With more than 17,000 cases only from this year pending at the five functional ATCs, the number is at least 50 times higher than other provinces, especially Khyber Pakhtunkhwa which has the lowest number.
According to the figures obtained from prosecution departments of all the four provinces, out of the 17,000 cases in Sindh, around 11,000 are only from Karachi.
On the other hand, Balochistan Prosecutor General Salahuddin Mengal said there were 344 cases while prosecution officials in Punjab said they had 327 cases pending in the anti-terrorism courts.
Surprisingly, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which despite being the most terror-hit province, has only 146 cases in its ATC docket, according to director-general prosecution Naimatullah Khan Gandapur.
The reasons for these discrepancies are several and range from organisational loopholes to unclear laws and their implementation and also, dare we say it, over-implementation of the anti-terror laws.

Organisational loopholes
In 2007, the government with the help of foreign funding attempted to take the district and deputy district attorneys away from the umbrella of the home or the law department and set up a separate and independent department for them in each province.
What ended up happening was the creation of new prosecution wings working under the provincial services and administration department. But after the 18th amendment, they were kicked back under the ambit of provincial law departments. What followed was a quintessential Pakistani amalgamation of legal matters and organisational hurdles.
Punjab and Balochistan have separate prosecution departments run by prosecution secretaries.
In Sindh, the provincial government attached the prosecution wing to the law department with a special secretary prosecution overlooking its functioning, a post which currently remains vacant.
But while the government was attempting to make prosecution independent and free from influence, it completely forgot to establish a service structure for its legal warriors. “To be honest, there is a lot of difference in the pay scale of prosecutors in Punjab and of Balochistan or other provinces and that is why many officers get demoralised and don’t do their job,” said Balochistan Prosecutor General Salahuddin Mengal.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s prosecution system is an amalgamation of old and new laws.
Its prosecution directorate works under the home department and is looked over by a director general.
The province is terrorised by bomb blasts but lacks by nautical miles in cases of extortion, kidnapping and target killings which also come under the ambit of anti-terrorism laws. “More often than not, the cases don’t even reach the high court,” said Naimatullah Khan Gandapur, the director-general prosecution in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. “As most of the cases we have are for bomb blasts, there are a lot of technicalities involved which the policemen are not aware of and hence can’t book a suspect in the case.”

Unclear laws, hazy application
Karachi Bar Association President Salahuddin Ahmed says that the laws drafted are so unclear that it is reflected in their implementation and allow room for politicisation.
More than often, the judgements passed by higher courts are also so confusing that they fail to provide any guidance in the application of laws.
For example, Section 6 of the Anti-Terrorism Act 1997, has clauses such as an act will be considered terrorism if it causes death, or involves grievous violence against a person or causes a grievous injury or danger to property. But it can also be dealt with under manslaughter and murder laws of the Pakistan Penal Code. Here is where the investigation officers exploit the cases to accept kickbacks.
“If the case is tried in an anti-terrorism court, the conviction rate is higher and bails are unheard of, and here is a greater chance that the suspect will be punished,” said Ahmed.
“While in regular courts, they are more likely to get bail. The investigation officers exploit them by accepting bribes on sending the cases to regular courts instead of anti-terrorism courts.” A lot of discretion also rests on the shoulders of prosecutors working in those ATCs and how they frame the cases.

The story of Karachi
The city leads the way in terrorism cases because political or organised violence is rife here in the form of kidnapping for extortion or targeted and sectarian attacks which fall under the definition of terrorism under the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997.
“Usually what comes to mind from the word terror is bomb blasts and suicide attacks,” said Karachi Bar Association President Salahuddin Ahmed. “However, the kind of organised violence plaguing Karachi — extortion, kidnapping for ransom, targeted killings and attacks — are all offences for which the ATC had been designed.”
The prevalence of such cases was already high, but the numbers surged exponentially since the federal and provincial governments began the operation against criminals.
Right now, according to ATC officials, five of the total 10 ATCs are functional with every court having to deal with at least 350 cases. One of the anti-terrorism courts even has more than 450 cases in its docket.
“If the rest of the five courts also become functional then the workload would reduce to around 100 cases per court,” said special public prosecutor Abdul Maroof.
“Sometimes we have as many as 90 cases piled up in a single day but we can practically deal with only two to three in a day while the rest of the suspects go back to prison without any development in their cases.” Then there is the matter of registering homicide cases under the anti-terrorism laws just to give them priority.
When a case gets a lot of media attention, government officials hurry and send the case to ATC for a speedy trial which in the due process takes at least three to four months to decide.
This by no means helps clearing the long backlog of cases already pending for hearing. “Unfortunately the prosecution department in Sindh is too politicised, probably because it falls under the ambit of the provincial law department,” said an ATC official requesting anonymity. “They throw cases highlighted by the media or the civil society our way and this delays the verdicts in the actual terrorism cases.”