PM’s discretionary power: ‘Transfer me so I can look after sick brother'

AG summoned over civil servant’s plea for transfer so he can spend time in country looking after handicapped...

LAHORE:

Sheikh Azmat Saeed of the Lahore High Court has admitted for regular hearing a petition from a civil servant seeking relocation from the Commerce and Trade Group of the Foreign Service of Pakistan to the District Management Group or the Police Service of Pakistan and summoned the attorney general for July 5.

During the proceedings, the judge questioned the discretionary powers of the prime minister, under Rule 57 of the Rules of Business for the Federal Government, 1973, to switch Central Superior Services (CSS) officers between occupational groups. He wondered what the justification for the powers was and asked the attorney general to prepare a report for the next hearing.

“The judge asked the attorney general to explain why the prime minister’s discretionary powers were exercised only to favour the relatives of influentials, generals and MNAs,” Ashtar Ausaf Ali, the petitioner’s counsel, later told The Express Tribune.

Petitioner Muhammad Suleyman Khan, an officer in the Ministry of Commerce, submitted that he had been allocated to the Commerce and Trade Group after passing the CSS exams in 2001 but that he had really wanted to join the DMG like his late father. But the DMG, he said, had already been filled because of previous allocations.

He said that his father Chaudhry Hameedullah Khan was assassinated in 1987 while serving as deputy commissioner of Rajanpur. He said his mother Tasneema Sadiq fought for the next six years to pursue the killers, but had to withdraw the case in 1993 in the face of death threats.

She died a year later, he said, still grief-stricken over her husband’s murder and her failure to win justice.

Left an orphan, the petitioner said, he had to take on the responsibility of managing his family’s property and looking after his handicapped brother from a very young age.

He said that as an officer in the Foreign Service, he had to travel abroad a lot and he couldn’t do so while he was looking after his brother.

Ali said that the petitioner’s brother, Saeedullah Khan, had written to the prime minister in 2009 asking him to place his brother in a different group, but he refused. He said the petitioner filed an application with the Ministry of Commerce secretary on August 3, 2010, but had received no reply so far.

He submitted that reallocation of occupational groups was an interchangeable and transferable right in special and individual cases and there were numerous cases where the prime minister or other state functionaries had exercised their discretion to do so. He said one example was of a Helena Rizwan Tareen, who was transferred from the Foreign Services of Pakistan to the Police Services of Pakistan after the assassination of her husband in 1995.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 15th, 2011.