Internment centres
IT is a long overdue redressal of rights violations perpetuated against the people of the tribal areas, an injustice that became all the more indefensible after the region’s merger with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in early 2017. On Thursday, the Peshawar High Court declared the scores of internment centres operating in the area since years as being unconstitutional. The two-judge bench also ordered the provincial police chief to assume control of the sites within three days and form a committee to review each case and free the individuals found to be detained on undetermined grounds. Crucially, the Peshawar High Court also struck down the legislation that allowed laws in force in Fata and Pata before their merger with KP to remain extant even after that historic event, whose avowed purpose was to bring these areas into the constitutional fold. These regulations, enacted in 2011 but applied retrospectively from 2008, gave security forces sweeping powers to arrest and indefinitely detain any individual, and also sanctioned the setting up of internment centres. For the government to not only try and maintain the status quo through its legislative powers, but to extend that status quo surreptitiously to the rest of KP through an ordinance passed in August — also declared illegal by the court — defies all norms of justice.
The shadowy detention centres in Fata and Pata, sometimes likened to the Guantanamo Bay prison complex or the ‘black sites’ in Afghanistan, have long been a stain on this country’s reputation. ‘Security concerns’ is a bogey calculated to elicit unquestioning acquiescence of the wider public to repressive, extralegal measures that jettison constitutional guarantees of due process and security of person. This is nowhere better illustrated than with the internment facilities and all that has become associated with them; including enforced disappearances and unprecedentedly opaque trials by military courts, many of which ended in the death penalty being handed down.
Numerous reports have emerged of individuals having been abducted, and held at such locations for years, without charge and without trial — or without any intimation to their families who have been left running pillar to post in an effort to locate their loved ones. In October 2017, the Supreme Court summoned a complete record of the detainees at 45 internment centres; the government subsequently disclosed during the proceedings that it had sent 1,330 people to these sites. However, even where the courts have attempted to assign responsibility for enforced disappearances or obtain information about the prisoners, they have been thwarted time and again by government functionaries through one legal loophole or another. There can be no more emphatic denunciation than the Peshawar High Court’s verdict of this ‘security’ regime that transported individuals into a black hole where they languished at the state’s pleasure. Finally, for people of the tribal areas, in an importance sense, it is no longer a case of one country, two systems.
Published in Dawn, October 21st, 2019
Modern-day slavery
UNDER Unesco’s definition, modern-day slavery is characterised by “an element of ownership or control over another’s life, coercion and the restriction of movement” and “by the fact that someone is not free to leave or to change an employer”. Under this terminology fall all acts of coerced services and exploitative labour — from human trafficking and debt bondage to forced marriage. Modern-day slavery goes against the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically Article 4, which states that “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms”. Regrettably, this ideal is far from being a reality for tens of millions of people around the world. Human bodies are callously reduced to objects of capitalist value — and only that — to be used, abused and bartered in the pursuit of profit. As Europe marked its Anti-Trafficking Day last Friday, the secretary general of the Council of Europe made an appeal to the governments of the continent to ensure justice for the victims of human trafficking, along with reparations. In the past several years, the European Union has struggled to contain the menace of human trafficking within its borders. While it is difficult to give exact figures on the scale of such illicit activities, the UN estimates that approximately 40.3m of the world’s population can be classified as modern-day slaves, with many trapped in the human trafficking web through the use of coercion, deceit or violence. Unlike smuggling, trafficking is always carried out without any form of consent of the victim. Furthermore, the vast majority of victims are women and girls, while nearly 25pc of all victims are children.
With some of the highest rates of slavery in the world, Pakistan is no stranger to the evils of modern-day slavery. Approximately, 3.19m Pakistanis are classified as modern-day slaves. Many become imprisoned in trafficking rings and forced marriages — a practice so common, it barely causes a stir and remains underreported — while others get tricked into organ mining and debt bondage — a contract so cruel, it is often passed down several generations, and is especially rampant in the agriculture and brick kiln industries, with entire families working to pay off the debt. It bears repeating: slavery is not a problem of the past.
Published in Dawn, October 21st, 2019
Luck of the draw?
A RECENT petition before the Lahore High Court, filed by the Pakistan Railways Employees Union, has challenged the appointment of more than 800 new inductees through Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed’s rather novel hiring process of selection via lottery rather than on the basis of merit. Yet even this seemingly randomised process has been called into question by the petition’s claim that over half of these recruits mysteriously hail from only two constituencies — one of the railways minister himself and the other of his nephew, MNA Sheikh Rashid Shafiq. Besides this, a question mark hangs over the potential application of this arbitrary approach to hiring in other government departments. The railways minister announced his intent to fill up vacancies by balloting in May this year. On June 17, following the federal cabinet’s approval, the Establishment Division issued a notification detailing amendments made to the Civil Servants (Appointment, Transfer and Promotion) Rules, 1973. The amendments included changes to Rule 16 to allow for vacancies in BPS-1 to BPS-5 posts to be filled on a local basis “through balloting”. Granted, this was followed on June 29 with a memorandum of guidelines providing some criteria of qualification and aptitude, but this appears to have led only to more confusion than clarity.
When the present government assumed office last year, some 171,000 federal posts lay vacant. Such a massive deficit of human resources has undoubtedly strained federal functioning, but there is no quick or easy fix to this conundrum. In fact, exposing such recruitments to questions of their legitimacy — through a process that is both unconstitutional and illogical — will only create more impediments in the way of good governance. This shortcut method of hiring government employees gives rise to many issues, such as its susceptibility to rigging. Another question is whether these arbitrarily selected cohorts of inductees would later be subjected to performance evaluations. And if the answer is ‘yes’, then why can’t a similar evaluation process simply be applied at the hiring stage itself?
Published in Dawn, October 21st, 2019