The police — an excoriating report

The organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW) is rightly regarded as one of the world’s pre-eminent rights organisations, its meticulous investigations highly regarded, models of their kind. It should therefore be no surprise to find that one of its most recent reports about the police in Pakistan is a damning indictment, a chronicle of failure at every level. To quote — ‘the police are one of the most feared institutions of state’, The report details custodial torture, extrajudicial executions, harassment, extortion and refusal to register cases especially when they are against members of the security services. There is little accountability anywhere in the system and police forces are often controlled by powerful politicians, landowners and business-people.

Poor people and marginalised groups are most at risk of being abused by the police, but it can be anybody who is caught in the whimsical and arbitrary web of deceit, falsehood and criminality committed by the very public servants that are meant to preserve and protect all of the citizens of the nation. Most damningly the report suggests that far from condemning these activities the state even encourages serious human rights violations, often by neglect but equally often as a calculated move. Police who contributed to the report admitted they had taken part in or set up ‘fake encounters’ — killing an individual already in custody. Pressure from the higher command or local ‘influentials’ may underlie the ‘encounters’, but they can easily be the result of a failure by the police themselves to gather sufficient evidence for a prosecution. None of this is new news, and the fact that the report has received scant attention from the national media underscores the lack of concern regarding human rights violations that are commonplace, institutionalised and the norm rather than the exception. The report exemplifies the rot at the very heart of the state, the collapse of moral and ethical values that stretches across society as a whole. Few will read it, even fewer take cognisance of it and we expect nothing to change as a result. Shameful.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 28^th, 2016.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.