18th Amendment revisited: Centre should retain education, environment

SM Zafar calls for new amendments to the constitution to make it more acceptable.

ISLAMABAD:

The main issues with the devolution of core subjects to the provinces under the 18th Amendment have been higher education, drug control and environment. To make the alteration in the constitution “more acceptable”, there should be a new amendment, argued senior lawyer Senator SM Zafar.

At a talk on 18th constitutional amendment on Tuesday, he said that the new amendment should hand these subjects back to the federation. The Seminar “Revisiting 18th Constitutional Amendment” was organised jointly by Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI) and Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSF).

Senator Zafar from PML-Q, who was also member of the Constitutional Amendment Committee, insisted that he had raised his voice against the abolition of the concurrent list. “The institution of compulsory education, right to information and fair trial as fundamental rights were the most important contribution of the amendment to the constitution,” he said.

The issue of free and fair elections, share of the provinces under the NFC award and independent judiciary were also discussed at the occasion.

Zafar added that the chief election commissioner was empowered by the constitutional amendment and it was his duty to prepare people to cast their votes freely without fear.

Moreover, Babar Sattar, a lawyer, opined that the judiciary’s stand on the appointment of judges is flawed. “Due process, transparency and security of tenure of judges, [which] would ensure the freedom of judiciary, should also be in the hands of judges,” said Sattar.

Meanwhile, Dr Ashfaque Hussain, an economist, was of the view that the 10th National Finance Commission (NFC) Award was a blunder as it lacked economic foundation. “It was purely a political award as it did not take into account the rising expenditure, the war on terror and high interest payments,” he said.

He added that to recover from the blunder, the implementation of the NFC Award should be postponed for three years or “we would be imposing a hand-binding constraint on the provinces to generate a targeted surplus”.

On the other hand, Dr Pervez Tahir defended the NFC award and 18th Amendment as the “best things” that have happened to the country as both were based on national consensus. “If the 18th Amendment results in improvement of governance, there would be less corruption, otherwise the present trend would continue,” he said.

Another speaker at the conference, Dr Iram Khalid, criticised judiciary’s meddling in state affairs in the past, “which worked as a helping hand in military takeovers”.

He called for reforms in lower judiciary which is a “source of suffering for the common man”.



Published in The Express Tribune, June 29^th, 2011.