Asma Jahangir Conference: Extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances continuing for decades: says Babar

LAHORE: Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) leader Farhatullah Babar has said enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings have been continuing in Pakistan for decades.

He was speaking at the ‘Extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions, and enforced disappearances’ session on the concluding day of the Asma Jahangir Conference, here on Sunday. Saroop Ijaz, senior counsel, Human Rights Watch Asian Division, moderated the session.

Farhatullah said the Commission of Inquiry of Enforced Disappearances had failed to solve the cases of missing persons. No FIR was lodged against the kidnappers, he said adding that once chairman of the commission was called by the Senate Committee on Human Rights, who admitted that FIRs were not lodged as the missing persons returning home did not want to fight their cases in courts. They did not even name the persons who had kidnapped them, he added. The commission was not able to prosecute even a single person, he regretted.

Once Akhtar Mengal had threatened the PTI government with parting ways if the Baloch missing persons were not released, Farhat said. Some of the missing persons were released after pressure was exerted by Mengal, he recalled.

There was complete impunity for the perpetrators, he said adding that those involved in such acts must be brought to book. Rory Mungoven, chief of Asia Pacific section of the Office of Civilian Human Resources (OCHR), said a tireless campaign against extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances was needed.

The phonation had been seen in the region, he said adding that it happened in Myanmar, and the phenomenon had seen surge in Sri Lanka also. He said that several countries had criminalised extrajudicial killings. In India, enforced disappearances have also happened and international conventions must be enforced to curb it. Shabir Hussain said the issue of missing persons and extrajudicial killings came to the fore in Pakistan when military operations started in 2008 in FATA and other areas. In response to a question, he said the judiciary had not failed. Actually, courts were overcrowded. There was no specific law by which a court could make the perpetrators produce the missing persons.

Amina Janjua highlighted the plight of the families of missing persons. According to her, families had shattered as their loved-ones/ heads of the families had been taken illegally. She said when her husband was abducted, she was not given any justification for it. As a wife, she was shattered. She shared for her husband, and there was no one to raise voice for her, and even parliamentarians were silent on the issue. She said families could not afford paying the fee of lawyers. “I made an organisation, so that cases of missing persons could be contested,” she said. She termed the enforced disappearances one of the biggest tortures on the earth. She regretted that the law protected the perpetrators. She said production orders were issued in 200 missing persons’ cases, but nothing had happened. She said 300 cases had been sent to the working group.

Lawyer Michael P. Jette said prosecutors lacked capacity to fight missing persons’ cases. He said they were not trained and one could not expect of them to handle the enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killing cases expertly.