Karachi law and order case: Apex court to resume hearing today

CJP Tassaduq Hussain Jillani will be taking up the high-profile case for the first time.

KARACHI: A larger bench of the Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani, will resume the hearing of the Karachi law and order case from Monday (today) at its Karachi registry branch.

The three-member bench, which also includes Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali and Justice Khilji Arif Hussain, will go over the progress made by the federal, provincial and local authorities to end violence in the city.

This will be the first time that CJ Jillani will be a part of the bench hearing the high-profile case which was initiated in August 2011. Former chief justice Iftikhar Hussain Chaudhry had conducted the last session of the proceedings. Among the main directions issued to the authorities was the formation of a task force to rid the country of the menace of illegal and unverified mobile SIMs - one of the most common communication tools used by terrorist and criminal groups operating within or outside the country to execute their plots.

Other orders included confiscation of illegal weapons by the police and verification of their licences by the National Database and Registration Authority, computerisation of the unregistered state lands record, elimination of no-go areas, ending the smuggling of arms and ammunitions, and plugging import duties evasion.

Around 150 different petitions, miscellaneous applications and reports are fixed and expected to be taken up by the bench, according to the roster.

Ahead of hearing, the SC’s registrar office has already issued notices to the attorney general of Pakistan, Sindh’s advocate general and prosecutor general, chief secretary, inspector general of police, director-general of Inter-Services Intelligence, Intelligence Bureau, Pakistan Maritime Security Agency, Pakistan Rangers, interior and home secretaries, the election commission secretary, director-general of National Database and Registration Authority, members of the Sindh High Court’s inspection team-II and customs department. Notices have also been issued to the city government’s Settlement Survey and Land Record Department’s director, the Sindh Board of Revenue’s land utilisation department and the Karachi Development Authority’s land department director to appear with their reports.

Illegal SIMs

Implementing the much-desired biometric system for issuance of new mobile SIMs only in Karachi would lead to an influx of unverified SIMs from other cities unless this facility is launched nationwide, said the task force constituted on the directives of the Supreme Court, while sharing their apprehension at one of its recent meetings. This was revealed in a report submitted to the Supreme Court by the Sindh police’s DIG Sultan Ali Khawaja, who is the focal person for the task force.

On November 29, 2013, the SC had ordered the interior ministry, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, private cellular providers and police high-ups to devise a mechanism put an end to the use of illegal and unverified mobile SIMs.

Referring to the meetings of the task force, the report by the DIG stated that PTA has taken up the issue of calls made for extortion and ransom with the cellular companies and asked them to block illegal or unverified SIMs. The meeting was informed that the deployment of Biometric Verification System at the customer service centres and franchises have been completed but the retailers have yet to finalise details at their end. According to DIG Khawaja, if the biometric system is started only at Karachi, then there are high chances that the unverified SIMs from other cities will keep on coming to the city for illegal sale.

He added that the PTA has been requested to implement the biometric system immediately in all the franchises at different cities and to instruct the cellular service providers to stop sale of SIMs at retail shops where the biometric system is not yet implemented.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 24^th, 2014.