Farhatullah calls for helping Pakistanis imprisoned in Middle East

ISLAMABAD: Senator Farhatullah Babar said on Wednesday that Pakistanis were most vulnerable to get caught in the web of criminal justice system in the Middle East but there was no structured plan to helping those hapless Pakistanis.

He was speaking at the launch of a report titled “Caught in the Web: Treatment of Pakistanis caught in the criminal justice system of Saudi Arabia” by the Justice Project of Pakistan at a hotel in Islamabad.

He said that a state like Pakistan which itself had no respect for a citizen’s life and whose own record of broken criminal justice system was pathetic could not be expected to stand for the life and liberty of its citizens caught on the wrong side of the law in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.

About the weird criminal justice system in Saudi Arabia he recounted the incident of a Pakistani named Abdul Ghafoor who landed at Medina airport on August 18, 2016 and disappeared the next day and had not been traced till now.

He said that the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate proposed that investigations for the missing Pakistanis be started from the point when Haji Ghafoor had an altercation with a police official at the gate of Masjid-e-Nabawi and was whisked away and was not seen since then.

The deafening silence of the Saudi authorities showed how Pakistanis caught in the web of Saudi criminal justice system could disappear without a trace. He then asked National Commission of Human Rights Chairman Justice Chowhan to take the case forward from the point the Senate Committee left it because of the end of its term.