Federal Secretary Human Rights Ministry Justice (Retd) Riaz Kayani said that criminals take advantage of “weaknesses” in the legal system to get away even in cases of heinous crimes.
At a meeting of the National Assembly Standing Committee on Human Rights here, Kayani, however, did not mention whether the government was making any attempt to remove such contradictions from the legal system.
The meeting, chaired by MNA Riaz Fitiyana, took up several matters wherein basic human rights were violated and criminals could not be punished in most of the cases.
In one such incident, people accused of molesting one male and five female children in Sialkot district of Punjab were arrested but could not be punished so far, a police officer told the meeting.
Kayani explained that in some cases influential criminals terrorise parents of the abused children for withdrawing cases against them. In other instances, he added, poor parents were bribed to withdraw charges against criminals.
Similarly, witnesses in such cases are either terrorised or bribed to change or withhold their statements in courts.
In all such circumstances, the secretary told the meeting, criminals were hardly punished despite the fact that their crime shocked the society.
However, he was silent on what action the government could and would take to make sure that the system of criminal justice was tuned in such a way that people involved in heinous crimes were penalised.
The committee also directed authorities to pursue the case of a gang rape victim in Sialkot and urged the family not to compromise with offenders.
A hostess of a private transport company was gang raped by three people earlier in the year and there were reports that culprits from influential landlord families were putting pressure on the girl for an “out of court” settlement.
The committee also sought details of a judicial commission formed to investigate an incident wherein policemen in civvies fired at protesters in Abbottabad on April 12, killing seven of them.
The agitation was against the renaming of the NWFP as Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
The panel condemned, what it called, a brutal assault on a Gaza-bond aid flotilla by Israeli commandos and urged the government to expedite efforts for the release of three Pakistanis captured in the raid.
Published in the Express Tribune, June 2nd, 2010.
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