Fighting human rights violations

The National Commission for Human Rights Bill should not end up being yet another govt body that is ruined by inertia.

On the surface, there is everything to welcome the Senate’s passage of the National Commission for Human Rights Bill. This will set up a body, headed by an experienced judge and include a minority member and the head of the National Commission on the Status of Women, to look into human rights abuses in the country. But the devil, as always, is in the details. By various accounts, especially of those who live in Balochistan, the intelligence agencies are allegedly behind the abduction and torture of many missing people. Any human rights commission worth its salt would include all state institutions within its ambit, without exception. This bill, however, has explicitly made an exception for the military. As a result, the commission will not be directly able to investigate the intelligence agencies but will instead have to refer any complaints to the ‘concerned authority’. This means the military will continue to police itself, and this takes out the role that parliament should have in holding all arms of the state accountable for their actions.

The bill also calls for setting up human rights courts that can ensure speedy trials of those accused of violations. This is another proposal that sounds fine on paper but whose results will be less than ideal. We already have more than enough parallel courts in Pakistan, which has led to a hodgepodge of justice where the anti-terrorism courts deliver speedy verdicts but, after an interminable wait, are usually overruled by higher courts. The solution is not to set up new courts, but to call on the regular judicial system to be more cognisant of human rights and to try and eliminate their backlog. Any new government human rights commission should complement and not compete with any existing independent human rights groups like the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. The commission should not end up being yet another government body that is ruined by inertia or used solely to attack political opponents.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 12^th, 2012.