Police officers should attend duty, not conferences, says Wahab

Sindh information and law adviser Barrister Murtaza Wahab has said that a few police officers, instead of focusing on their job of policing in the province, have started formulating a policy framework.

The police officers should focus on maintaining law and order, their principal job, he said while speaking with media persons after addressing a conference organised by the Sindh Judicial Academy in collaboration with the Legal Aid Society on Alternative Dispute Resolution at a hotel in Karachi on Saturday.

The chief minister’s adviser deplored that the situation of law and order had once again deteriorated in the metropolis, and the street crime was on the rise again. He regretted that Irshad Ranjhani was shot in broad daylight but police merely acted as spectators in the tragic episode.

Barrister Wahab said that during the recently conducted two-day police conference in Karachi where all the police high-ups were present, five murders were reported from areas across the province.

He said the real job of the police was policing and maintaining the law and order, rather than attending conferences.

Earlier, speaking at the Sindh Judicial Academy’s conference, the adviser said Sindh had become the first province of the country to adopt a piece of legislation to formalise the system of alternative dispute resolution enabling people to reach out-of-court settlements in order to lessen the burden of cases on the regular judicial system.

He noted that the Sindh Assembly at the start of the current year had passed legislation to this effect to formalise and make effective the role of Salis (mediator) in the system of alternative dispute resolution.

He said the provincial assembly had done its part to ease the process of dispensation of justice and now it was up to the judiciary to do its part in this regard.

The law adviser said the law was made to empower the mediator and facilitate people who wanted out-of-court settlements. He said the sole aim of this legislation was to provide justice to the common people in the society as the Sindh government believed in the fact that a society could not exist with injustices.

Wahab was of the view that sustainable change could only be achieved when all three pillars of the state could work together for tackling challenges and resolving the problems being faced by the people of the country or by the provinces.

He assured the audience of the conference that any executive intervention whenever required to make the process of alternative dispute resolution more effective would be provided by the Sindh government.