Safeguarding rights: Senate urged to reject Protection of Pakistan Bill

The International Commission of Jurists has called on the Senate of Pakistan to reject the PPO.

KARACHI:

The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) has called on the Senate of Pakistan to reject the Protection of Pakistan Ordinance (PPO).

The commission, in a briefing paper titled “Protection of Pakistan Ordinance – an affront to Human Rights” noted that the legislation will grant military and law-enforcement authorities sweeping powers to detain individuals, “in contravention of international human rights standards”.

The paper analyses the bill in light of Pakistan’s international law obligations and discusses how it fails to comply with international human rights law and standards.

The ICJ expressed serious concern that the PPO implementation will facilitate several human rights violations, including arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions.

“The bill must [also] be seen in the context of continuing enforced disappearances that remain unresolved and allegations of torture and extrajudicial executions that remain uninvestigated,” the commission noted in the briefing paper.

“In this light, certain provisions of the bill appear designed to entrench impunity for serious human rights violations that are crimes under international law,” the paper stated. “Therefore, the ICJ strongly recommends that the Senate reject the Protection of Pakistan Bill, 2014.”

ICJ added that while it condemns terrorism and recognises that Pakistan is facing a very real and serious threat from insurgents, “there is no conflict between the international legal duty of states to protect people threatened by terrorism and their responsibility to uphold the rule of law and human rights.”

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15^th, 2014.