KARACHI – At a time when the provincial assembly is struggling to make new laws, civil servants in Sindh continue to be held in check with General (retd) Musharraf’s draconian decree Removal from Service (Special Powers) Ordinance (RSO)-2000 – a law that has not only been repealed by the National Assembly but also scrapped by the provincial assemblies of Punjab, Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa.
The RSO-2000 provided absolute power to the government of the time to remove those unwanted or deemed redundant from service, and had been introduced after General (retd) Musharraf subjugated the judiciary through the Provincial Constitutional Order 2000. Legal experts argue that the Ordinance is against the tenets of Article 25 of the Constitution of 1973, which states: “All citizens are equal before law and are entitled to equal protection of law”. With the imposition of the RSO-2000, civil servants were left vulnerable to one-sided action and prosecution, and that too, without any recourse to legal redress.
After the restoration of democracy, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government sought to repeal many of the draconian laws of the Musharraf-era. On January 26, 2010, the National Assembly unanimously adopted the Removal from Service (Special Powers) Ordinance 2000 (Repeal) Bill 2010; the bill had been already sanctioned by the Senate on January 18, 2010. President Asif Ali Zardari subsequently signed the repeal bill on March 25, 2010.
The PPP government had also upheld repealing the RSO-2000 as one of its major achievements in the official book ‘Parliament at Work’: “the people’s government realised the negative impact of this legislation on the public sector employees and worked with the all parties in the parliament to annul this draconian and black law. After the repeal of this law, public servants will able to work without fear of victimisation or premature dismissal from service.”
RSO-2000: a draconian law that exists only in Sindh
