Rejecting the recently promulgated law “Action in aid of Civil Powers Regulations” in the tribal areas, the lawyers’ community Tuesday announced to initiate a legal battle against the regulations.
“The law has been promulgated by the US agents for pleasing their lords at the cost of the interests the nation and country,” Ghulam Nabi Advocate, provincial chief of Islamic Lawyers Moment, at the Peshawar Press Club.
Criticising the so-called champions of the Pakhtun cause, he said dozens of innocent people had been killed at the hands of ‘MQM and ANP’ hooligans in Karachi during the existing wave of terror, but the US agents want peace only in the provincially and federally administered tribal areas (PATA and FATA).
Flanked by renowned lawyer Essa Khan of Peoples’ Lawyers Forum, Bilal Durrani of PPP-Sherpao, Noor Alam Khan of Professional Lawyers Forum, Saadullah Marwat, Fida Gul Advocate and Usman Khan, he claimed that the stated regulations were the worst kind of legislation in the civilised world.
“These legislations mean to give a licence to the army and the agencies personnel to kill innocent people,” he claimed, adding that the draconian regulations were promulgated by the government of the so-called liberal, peace-loving and development-oriented government, which believed in the supremacy of law.
He said the government was trying to implement the law since February 2008, which was a violation of Article 14 of the constitution given the fact that hundreds of innocent people were in the torture cells being run by the spy agencies.
“The lawyers’ community demands to immediately provide a list of those in the torture cells to the apex court. “The law says that an ‘authority’ can keep any person in the habeas corpus for an indefinite time period, which is against the basic human rights,” he argued. The law justified the extra-judicial killing of citizens in any operation against suspected elements and also legalised all the illegal acts including kidnapping and destroying the houses by the army and law enforcing agencies in the tribal areas, he added.
He said the agencies were given the authority to evacuate an area of its dwellers on a simple notice and bar the apex courts to intervene against any illegal act.
Ghulam Nabi recalled that the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chapter of Jamaat-e-Islami had already challenged the stated draconian regulations in the Supreme Court and the lawyers of other political parties would also soon move the top judiciary on the issue.
In reply to a query, he said if Qanoon-e-Shahdat was a hindrance in the legal proceeding against alleged terrorists why the entire existing judicial system was overhauled, because it was unable to act against the terrorists belonging to the MQM. He further said in case it was the appropriate law to combat terrorism in FATA and PATA it should also be extended to Karachi and Balochistan.
