Senators share anguish over enforced disappearances

Criticise performance of Commission of Inquiry on enforced disappearances

ISLAMABAD: Members of a parliamentary panel and the National Commission on Human Rights (NCHR) on Monday expressed exasperation and serious concerns over the increase in the cases of enforced disappearances across the country.

The Senate Functional Committee on Human Rights, chaired by the MQM’s Nasreen Jalil, met in the Parliament House to discuss the increasing cases of enforced disappearances.

At the outset, the committee expressed displeasure on absence of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances chief Javed Iqbal and noted that his absence was ‘suspicious’ and that Iqbal had probably skipped the meeting on purpose.



In her opening remarks, Jalil alleged that ‘the establishment’ was involved in enforced disappearances which had traumatised thousands of families.  She said lives of the people associated with the missing persons completely shattered when they received dead and tortured corpses of their loved ones.

She said the security institutions were not abiding by the law. “They [missing persons] are not even presented for legal procedure but only dead bodies are received by their families,” Jalil said. “However, despite gravity of the situation nobody is paying any heed to the crisis,” she added.

The NCHR Director General Justice (retd) Ahmed Nawaz Chohan told the committee that right now details of disappeared persons had to be sought from security establishment and the NCHR had constantly to pursue the agencies for a follow-up.



“This dependency on such sources makes it difficult for the NCHR to follow the cases independently,” he said, adding that there was a need to end this dependency through legislation – a remark seconded by PPP Senator Farhatullah Babar.

Chohan said they were facing problems in taking legal action against the suspects as there were no laws concerning the issue. “Pakistan [law] has no proper definition of enforced disappearance,” he added.

Criticising performance of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, Babar said parliament, the Supreme Court and other institutions had also failed to stop enforced disappearances whose number, he said, was rising.

“We can blame some forces for such acts but we also need to look at what we have done on our part,” he said, adding that it was useless to talk about performance of the commission as its head was absent.



Senator Kalsoom Parveen, who had appeared in the committee for her proposed bill for transgender rights, said: “It is happening in the volatile few districts of the Balochistan and nobody cares about those families and the victims.”

Babar asked the Foreign Office’s Additional Secretary Mansoor Ahmad why Pakistan was not a signatory to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.

Ahmad said the process to become a part of the accord was under way but some domestic obligations had to be met before signing such conventions.

The panel also demanded making public a 2012 report – compiled by Justice Mansoor Kamal – on missing persons. It also called for unveiling a report compiled by the UN's Working Group on Enforced Disappearances.