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Friday March 29, 2024

Govt told to explain policy on Turkish schools staff’s deportation

By our correspondents
March 26, 2017

The Sindh High Court has directed the federal government to submit its policy on the deportation of staffers of the Pak-Turk schools foundation.

The court was hearing a petition filed by parents, students and teachers challenging the government decision to deport the staff members of the foundation. 

The interior ministry had ordered the Turkish staff of the educational network to leave Pakistan, rejecting their applications for extensions of visas. 

The petitioners’ counsel, Abdul Hameed Khoso, argued that the Pak-Turk foundation was a non-profit non-governmental organisation, which had nothing to do with the politics of Pakistan or Turkey. He said the deportation order would hurt the interests of 11,000 students.

He submitted that Turkish teachers had applied for extensions of their visas, but the government had ordered them to leave the country, instead. 

The counsel further stated that the Pak-Turk schools provided inexpensive but quality education, and the decision to deport the teachers would harm the future of the students.  He said the affected staff had applied to different countries for visas as they did not want to return to Turkey due to security concerns. He asked that the staffers be not deported till they got visas of other countries.

The additional attorney general submitted that there was no order for the closure of the schools, but the visas of the Turkish school administration staffers had not been extended due to the state policy.

He said the Turkish staff were staying in the country after the expiry of their visas.

A division bench, headed by Justice Munib Akhtar, directed the federal law officer to submit a policy statement with regard to the deportation of the Turkish staffers, saying the matter related to the life and liberty of people. 

The court continued the interim stay order suspending the federal government’s decision to deport the staffers till further orders.

 

PPPP census plea

The Sindh High Court issued notices to the Statistics Bureau, census commissioner and others on Friday over a petition of the Pakistan Peoples Party Parliamentarians seeking engagement of public participation in the ongoing sixth national census and appointment of impartial enumerators.

Filing the petition in the court, PPPP leader Farhatullah Babar and Muala Bux Chandio submitted that several important aspects had been hidden from the public, and demanded that the process of the census should be transparent.

They said people were complaining against the process as there was no procedure for verifying the data of the family. They said the assistant commissioners, who had been notified as census district officers, should maintain the record in their public office and the data should be accessible to the public at large in terms of Article 19-A of the constitution. 

The two submitted that impugned exercise undertaken by the census staff was not being done in a transparent manner.

They also sought the establishment of an emergency complaint centre accessible to the public where grievances regarding wrong, false and fabricated entries could be addressed timely and in effective manner. They also sought injunctions for action, arguing that several sections of the General Statistics (Reorganisation) Act was contrary to Article 19-A of the constitution.

A division bench, headed by Justice Munib Akhtar, directed the petitioners’ counsel to satisfy the court over the maintainability of the petition and to also explain how the petitioners who were part of the provincial government could file a petition against the census process. Farooq H Naek said that they were questioning the procedure of the census and implementation of the law. The court issuing notices to the respondents for April 3 directed the petitioners to satisfy the court on maintainability of the petition.