Law and order case: Sindh govt yet to implement Supreme Court directives

Five years on, provincial government has done little on security front

KARACHI: The Supreme Court (SC) will resume implementation proceedings of orders passed in the suo motu case regarding the law and order situation in Karachi today.

The apex court had passed a landmark judgment, which contained various orders, directives and observations regarding a host of issues the judges had noted that were the key factors behind the violence in the port city. The proceedings were initiated on August 22, 2011 and the judgment was delivered in October of the same year.



The court had ordered for depoliticising and strengthening of the police and other investigating agencies, removing no-go areas, de-weaponising the city, arresting target killers, action against the militant wings backed by political groups, delimiting political constituencies, ending turf-wars, registering state lands to protect them from land grabbers, making laws to effectively prosecute criminals and acting against the outdated public transport vehicles.

However, what seems to still be missing after five years is that the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)-led provincial government has done little on its own. However, it still claims successes by relying largely on what the federal government, led by its main rival the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, has done.

Solely relying on the targeted operation launched by the federal government, the provincial government claims it has fully implemented the multi-dimensional judgment of the Supreme Court to contain violence in Karachi.

Confining those orders to the law and order realm, the PPP government has done little on its part in the compliance of the various orders and directives despite the lapse of five years.

Then chief justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, had taken a suo motu notice as Karachi went through one of its most violent summers in 2011 and subsequently passed a landmark judgment ordering the federal, provincial and local authorities to adopt corrective measures.

In its report outlining the five-year progress on implementation of such orders, as sought by the apex court, the government says that with the support of all provincial and federal law enforcement agencies it had initiated targeted operations to crush criminals to secure lives of citizens and establish the writ of the law in letter and spirit.



“With the advent of the targeted operation in Karachi, the activities of various militant wings of political parties have been contained to a greater extent,” Sindh chief secretary Muhammad Siddique Memon maintained in the report.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 11^th, 2016.