On Thursday, the court again ordered a report on all individuals being secretly detained at government facilities following a petition. The judicial viewpoint on this is straightforward: why are people held without any charges filed against them? By now most people who follow the news can come up with their own follow-up question — if someone has committed a crime, they ought to be punished after their trial. Right?
The trouble with these questions is that they have been put before the interior ministry too many times before and have had little or no effect. Assuming the interior ministry has a list of those held captive without trial proceedings, it would be a tall order to expect them to keep that list updated. And what can the ministry possibly do if the detentions are not recorded by the agency concerned?
The only report that the authorities can turn to under the circumstances is the one prepared by one of the point persons for missing persons, Amina Janjua. Since March 2011, the Inquiry Commission for Missing Persons has catalogued 4,229 cases and succeeded in resolving 2,939 of them. Local rights groups openly contest these figures saying the true figure is shockingly high.
Our citizens remain schematically unprotected in the law from this practice. Any enforced disappearance is the epitome of a crime committed under the shield of invisibility. One way to resolve the issue is to devise an overarching legal framework based on those international standards reaffirmed in jurisprudence.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 27th, 2017.
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