Law officers

The chief justice of the Lahore High Court set aside the orders removing 20 lawyers of the advocate general’s office on May 15, ruling that the notification was illegal. The CJ said the language used in the notification was objectionable. He said the word ‘removal’ [from office] could stigmatise the lawyers’ careers. The advocate general, however, said the word was derived from law manuals and was not intended to disgrace the lawyers.

YouTube

On May 16, the Lahore High Court gave the Ministry of Information Technology time till June 6 to ask YouTube whether it wanted to appear before the court regarding a petition on lifting the ban on access to the website in Pakistan. Petitioner Bytes for All had submitted that internet censorship was counterproductive and deprived Pakistanis of the right to access information and to counter propaganda against their country or beliefs. Curbing access to YouTube was the modern equivalent of taking away a scholar’s pen, the petitioner said.

Sarabjit Singh

On a request by the Punjab chief minister, the Lahore High Court on May 16 appointed Justice Syed Mazahar Ali Akbar Naqvi as an inquiry judge to hold a judicial inquiry into the killing of Indian prisoner Sarabjit Singh by some prisoners in Kot Lakhpat Jail.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 20^th, 2013.

LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) Justice Mansoor Ali Shah while hearing a petition challenging the ban on YouTube on Thursday, adjourned hearings till June 6 on the request of the Ministry of Information Technology.

The court was informed by the law officer representing the ministry that Google‘s administration, parent company of YouTube, is still considering if it should appear before the Pakistani court therefore the proceeding should be adjourned.

YouTube was blocked across Pakistan on September 17, 2012 following orders by then-prime minister Raja Pervez Ashraf after the video sharing website refused to honour requests of the Pakistan government to block or remove clips from a sacrilegious film from the website.

The court on previous hearing had sought assistance of the ministry on the matter and had also directed it to approach the Google administration and seek their point of view.

The deputy attorney general had previously told the court that the federal government was willing to lift the ban, but could not till the offending clips could still be accessed on the website.

In the petition on behalf of the NGO ‘Bytes for All’, Advocate Yasser Latif Hamdani submitted that all internet curbs are counterproductive and deprive Pakistanis of their right to access of information as well as the right to counter any propaganda against the country or against what they believe in strongly.

In the petition, Hamdani said that taking away YouTube’s access is the modern equivalent of taking away the scholar’s pen. He argued that ultimately all curbs would hurt Pakistan more than it will hurt those who are engaging in scurrilous and offensive rhetoric. On the other hand, Pakistani students, teachers and researchers have been deprived of a great resource of knowledge and information.

LAHORE: The Lahore High Court Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial on Thursday appointed Justice Syed Mazahar Ali Akbar Naqvi as inquiry judge to hold a judicial inquiry into the killing of Indian prisoner Sarabjit Singh by his fellow prisoners in Kot Lakhpat jail.

Punjab caretaker chief minister Najam Sethi had earlier sent a letter to the LHC chief justice with a request to appoint a judge of the court to hold judicial probe into the incident soon after the injured Indian spy was admitted to hospital for treatment.

Justice Naqvi is expected to start his inquiry from Friday.

According to the prosecution Sarbjit Singh, resident of Bhikhiwind village of Amritsar, had illegally crossed the Indian border at Kasur on August 29, 1990 and was arrested on allegations of conducting four bomb blasts in three cities of Punjab including Faisalabad, Multan and Lahore on July 29, 1990 in FIR registered against Manjeet Singh. Sarabjit given death sentence under section of 302 (murder) and 307 (attempt to murder) of Pakistan Penal Code and section 3 of Explosive Substance Act on August 15, 1991, a significant day as it is the day of independence of India.

Defending Singh, his counsel Awias Sheikh had maintained the stance that Singh was given sentence only on the basis of his confession statement which, according to him, was made before a TV camera and after being tortured, hence having no legal value.

Sheikh maintained till the end that Sarabjit’s case was one of mistaken identity. He sent several mercy appeals to President of Pakistan for his release on humanitarian grounds.

The lawyer had further argued that the FIR was registered against Manjeet Singh but prosecution forcefully presented Sarabjit as Manjeet Singh and got him convicted in a fabricated case.

Last week, after his death, the Indian daily The Hindustan Times quoted a senior Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) official as saying that that Sarabjit was indeed an Indian spy who had had gone to Pakistan for an operation at the behest of the Indian spy agency.

The managing official later became the external intelligence agency’s chief.

“Sarabjit was an Indian spy in Pakistan. He managed to accomplish the task given to him but was caught while trying to flee,” the newspaper cited an intelligence source as saying.

The Pakistani government had maintained that he was an Indian spy, but Sarabjit’s family said he was a farmer who accidentally crossed the border into Pakistan while drunk.

Both petitions were filed on May 9, two days before election day. The first was filed by rights activist and actor Faryal Gohar, seeking directions for the PML-N not to exhibit tigers at its election rallies, as it was endangering both the animals and the people at the campaign events.

The second was filed by PPP secretary general and former Punjab governor Sardar Latif Khosa, who sought a ban on the party and its president Mian Nawaz Sharif over a newspaper advertisement which, according to the petitioner, sought to give the impression that the PML-N had the support of the chief justice of Pakistan.

The court issued notice to the Election Commission of Pakistan’s secretary and other respondents for May 14 on Gohar’s petition, while no date was set for the hearing of Khosa’s petition.

Legal experts are of the view that these petitions, which could have hurt the PML-N’s election campaign, are now of little interest and will probably be disposed of. In case the court does go the extra mile and decides the petitions, the results are likely to be directions to the party’s counsel to simply make assurances that the PML-N will desist from ill behaviour.

Politicians use various tactics to hurt each other’s election campaigns and such petitions are sometimes just that, say the experts. With the elections done with and the campaigns a closed chapter, there is likely to be little motivation to pursue them.

Election matters

A full bench of the LHC – made up of Justice Ijazul Ahsan, Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah and Justice Mazahar Ali Akbar Naqvi – decided 246 petitions concerning election matters between April 10 and May 9.

The bench also referred 17 petitions to the chief justice for adjudication by single benches because they were not deemed to be urgent.

The chief justice had set up six election tribunals, each consisting of two judges. Three tribunals sat at the principal seat in Lahore, and one each at Rawalpindi, Bahawalpur and Multan. Appeals against the tribunals’ decisions were made before the full bench.

Some petitions remained pending. These included a petition by former president and army chief Pervez Musharraf, who had challenged a tribunal’s decision disqualifying him from the election contest at NA-139, Kasur.

The bench adjourned the matter on May 6 after Musharraf’s counsel confirmed that the All Pakistan Muslim League, which is led by the former army chief, was boycotting the elections. The petition was a matter of clearing the allegations against Musharraf.

The petition may, in the coming days, again attract the media spotlight. On May 9, the full bench referred a petition seeking the cancellation of the APML’s registration to the Election Commission.

On May 6, the bench directed Qari Zawar Bahadur, a Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan candidate in NA-126, to approach the Election Commission of Pakistan to redress his grievance that his election symbol had been misprinted on the ballot paper.

The ECP had allotted his party the key symbol, when the ballot papers showed it to be the dressing table. Bahadur ended up contesting the elections with the dressing table symbol.

Rana.tanver@gmail.com

Published in The Express Tribune, May 13^th, 2013.

PAT chief Dr Tahirul Qadri had promised to lead the protest and was in Lahore, but did not participate in the sit-in at the service road between Masjid-i-Shuhada and Charing Cross, disappointing many of his supporters. He addressed the protesters via a video link from his Model Town residence.

The participants stayed at the venue from 9am to 5pm, waving placards and banners and chanting slogans against the voting. They received lunch boxes from the party. Security was tight to ensure that there were no clashes with supporters of other parties. Raheeq Abbasi was the senior PAT leader at the sit-in.

In his address, Dr Qadri vowed to alter “the corrupt electoral system”. He said the PAT’s were the first “successful” sit-ins against the elections.

He said they would continue their struggle till there was “real change” in the country. He said the PAT was fighting against all parties that were trying to maintain the status quo.

He congratulated the PAT workers for their persistence.

He said that no single party could get a majority because of the electoral system. He predicted that “the party speaking about change” would “also join the corrupt”. He said that all the election campaigns had been sleazy. He said that the elections would result in “5 to 10 per cent new faces” and the rest would remain the same. He said his predictions made on December 23 were coming true.

“The political parties will start slinging mud at each other. At the end of this month, there will be massive horse-trading and the whole nation will remember what I said about this corrupt system,” he said.

Dr Qadri said that parties that had opposed the PAT were now themselves boycotting the elections, an apparent reference to the Jamat-i-Islami’s announcement in Karachi. The party forming government would only be able to do so after spending millions of rupees on buying seats.

A participant at the sit-in said that he was disappointed that his leader had not turned up. “Apparently he avoided coming to the venue because of security concerns,” he said. “But the lives of PAT activists are also at risk. We came here with our families.”

Published in The Express Tribune, May 12^th, 2013.

Under the present system, political parties get to nominate representatives for reserved seats for minorities based on their proportional strength in parliament. Before this system was introduced via the Legal Framework Order in 2002, minorities could elect their own candidates directly through separate voter lists.

Representatives of the Human Liberation Commission Pakistan and Masiha Millat Party said that they had asked Christians to vote, as it was their democratic duty, but at the same time to wear black armbands in order to protest their inability to directly elect Christian representatives.

The National Assembly has 10 reserved seats for minorities: four for Christians, four for Hindus, one for Ahmadis, and one for Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis and other non-Muslims.

HLCP chairman Aslam Parvez Sahotra said that under the present system, party leaders could choose who they wished to put in reserved seats, regardless of their status within the community.

“This minority representative has no incentive to hear the views of the community, as it was not through their votes that he reached parliament,” he said.

He said that the HLCP had filed a petition before the Lahore High Court challenging Article 51 (2)(a)(e) of the Constitution. Sahotra’s counsel Naseeb Anjum said that Article 51 (2)(a)(e) violated Article 25, which promised equal rights for all regardless of gender, religion or ethnicity.

He said that under the present system, the non-Muslim candidates didn’t represent the communities, but the party. “They are puppets who work for the party’s interest,” he said.

“As we can’t vote for our own representatives, nobody is accountable to us,” said MMP General Secretary Munir Shahid. He said that they had chosen the symbolic protest for election day to get the maximum publicity among minority members. The MMP was also organising sit-ins at Muridke, Gujranwala, Narang Mandi and Kamoke on election day, he added.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 11^th, 2013.

Another Pakistani prisoner, Abdul Jabbar, was reportedly attacked in a jail in New Delhi on Tuesday and is in critical condition, Express News reported.

Two Indian prisoners, Ranjeet and Ajay Kumar, allegedly attacked Jabbar’s face and neck with a blade, leaving him injured.

He was shifted to the jail infirmary to apparently keep the incident out of the media limelight so as to not incite more tit-for-tat attacks.

Jabbar was arrested after his visit visa to India expired and he was charged with committing espionage for Pakistan. He has so far spent nine years imprisoned in Tihar Jail.

Earlier on Thursday, Pakistani prisoner Sanaullah Haq succumbed to his injuries after being attacked by fellow inmates in a Srinagar jail last week. Hi body was flown back to Pakistan on Thursday evening.

Family distressed

Listening to news of attack on their loved one, family members of the Pakistani prisoner in Tihar Jail were shocked and demanded President Asif Ali Zardari to use diplomatic sources to ensure his treatment in Pakistan.

Talking to The Express Tribune, family members of Abdul Jabbar, who hails from Lahore, said they had not received any official information about his health with television informing them about the attack. Riaz Ahmed, Jabbar’s brother, lives in Dharampura area of Lahore. He told The Express Tribune that their mother, a heart patient, had lost her senses after hearing the news about Jabbar.

Ahmed added that Indian law enforcing agencies arrested his 50 year old brother in 2009 on an FIR registered which named a suspect as Syed Amir Ali. Ahmed says Jabbar was subsequently implicated him by labelling him with a fake name.

Aftab Ahmed, a close relative of Jabbar, told The Express Tribune that they are unable to contact him as they were not given any number to contact him.

LAHORE: The full bench of the Lahore High Court (LHC) issued a notice to World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Deputy Commissioner Office (DCO) Lahore after receiving a petition from Faryal Gohar regarding the death of a white tigress during the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) rally.

The rare tiger, in question, was brought unconscious to the University of Veterinary and Animal Sciences Lahore on Tuesday evening and vets tried to revive her but could not succeed, according to Dawn.

The court cannot issue notice to the PML-N leaders as they were not stated respondents in the petition, the court replied in response to the counsel’s request to send them the issue instead of DCO and WWF.

The PML-N created quite a buzz amongst the supporters by bringing their elections symbol, a live tiger, to their political rallies.

The police eventually determined that they had not broken any blasphemy or terrorism laws, as alleged, and released them without registering an FIR.

The Ahmadis were attending a hearing at the anti-terrorism court earlier in the day concerning relatives who have also been accused of blasphemy and terrorism offences by printing an Ahmadi newspaper, under Sections 295B and 298C of the Pakistan Penal Code and Section 11-W of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

Members of the Khatm-e-Nabuwat Lawyers Forum (KNLF) opposed the bail applications of Faisal Tahir, Azhar Zarif, Khalid Ashfaq and Tahir Mahmood.

Shortly after the court granted bail to two of the accused, Tahir and Zarif, some 15 men approached the five Ahmadis and, with the help of the police, snatched their mobile phones and took them away to Mustafabad police station, an Ahmadi who had spoken to the detainees later told The Express Tribune.

“They appeared to be very angry that two people had been granted bail,” he said. “They claimed that one of them had been wearing a ring inscribed with a Quranic verse, and that this was a crime. Apparently they intend to scare people from supporting or representing Ahmadis at trial.”

He said that the SHO had contacted an SP, who had investigated the complaint and then determined it to be baseless.

Hassan Muavia, the complainant in the case being heard earlier at the anti-terrorism court and of the application asking Mustafabad police to register an FIR, said one of the Ahmadis was wearing a ring with a Quranic verse written on it. “He was using the same finger to clean his nose, which is a crime and a sin,” he said.

Muavia, who is also a KNLF spokesman, claimed that the Ahmadis had been filming their movement and sending details of their vehicles to someone via SMS.

He said that the Ahmadis were planning to attack them. He said that the KNLF would move the courts to cancel the bails of the two men granted them on Tuesday, and to direct the police to register a case against the five Ahmadis released without an FIR.

Mustafabad SHO Saeed Sarwar told The Express Tribune that the complainants were harassing members of the Ahmadi community. He said their allegations were totally baseless and that was why they had not registered an FIR.

This is the third time this month that this set of anti-Ahmadi campaigners has sought to register cases against Ahmadis. In another case, seven Ahmadis are accused of violating Section 295B (defiling the Holy Quran) of the PPC and Section-11 of the ATA.

The anti-terrorism court was to hear their bail applications on Tuesday, but deferred them till May 13.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 8^th, 2013.

These campaigns appear in pamphlets and banners and backs of rickshaws. Some call democracy un-Islamic and demand a caliphate, while others decry elections as a mechanism controlled by the rich and powerful and devoted exclusively to their benefit.

Among these anti-democratic parties are the Pakistan Awami Tehreek headed by Dr Tahirul Qadri, the Tanzeem-i-Islami founded by the late Dr Israr Ahmed, the Hizbut Tahrir (which is outlawed in Pakistan), Sautul Ummah, Tehrik Azmat-i-Islam, and the Pakistan Ehtisab Party.

Though he has taken part in previous elections, Dr Qadri has asked his supporters to stage sit-ins on election day. In various statements, he has described the “corrupt system of elections” as a “nuisance” which will be followed by more corruption and more terrorism.

He has also insisted that he is not against democracy, but the “corrupt election process” in Pakistan.

Sautul Ummah makes no such distinctions. It says democracy is an un-Islamic import from the West and wants it replaced with a caliphate. Two common messages written on flexes at the back of rickshaws sponsored by the group are, ‘Leave democracy, bring Caliphate’ and ‘Will the country given to us by Allah have the rule of Allah or the rule of Parliament?’ Tehrik Azmat-i-Islam, a religious group based in Lahore, is sponsoring similar messages advertised on rickshaws.

The SU has also taken up a letter-writing campaign. It has written to various politicians and asked them to refrain from becoming part of the “anti-Islamic” democratic system. In one letter, it advises PTI chief Imran Khan to work to set up a caliphate in Pakistan, as that would be the work of a “true Muslim”.

The Pakistan Ehtisab Party, also based in Lahore, does not have religious motivation for its campaign.

The party is demanding that martial law be imposed in Pakistan while politicians are held accountable for their actions. The party has put up various banners in the city, most noticeably one displayed in front of the Lahore Press Club building a few days back. ‘We demand that the chief justice of Pakistan and Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani impose martial law in the country and send all politicians behind bars.’ The banner also calls for a boycott of the May 11 elections.

According to some legal experts, such behaviour is not just foolish, but a violation of the Constitution requiring the Election Commission of Pakistan’s notice.

“It is unconstitutional,” said Advocate Muhammad Azhar Siddique.

He said that Article 218 (3) of the Constitution required the Election Commission to stop any move that created a hindrance in the way of elections.

The Ahmadi community and some Christian groups have also decided to boycott the elections, in protest at religious discrimination.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 7^th, 2013.