Not within jurisdiction: Court should not be forming judicial commission, says AG

SHC had issued a contempt notice to the chief secretary for forming the commission.

KARACHI: The process of identifying the officials whose negligence led to more than 200 deaths in Thar has been delayed even further as the government challenges the court’s powers to constitute a judicial commission to investigate the tragedy.

Advocate-general (AG) Abdul Fatah Malik argued before a bench of the Sindh High Court that the formation of a judicial commission to investigate into the causes of deaths is not the court’s responsibility. To prove his claim, he sought time to prepare and make arguments.

The issue arose during the hearing of an application seeking contempt proceedings against chief secretary Sajjad Saleem Hotiana, who had allegedly formed an investigation commission to investigate deaths in the drought-hit areas of Thar on his own, instead of proposing the names of the members to the court to constitute the commission.

The court had earlier directed the chief secretary to forward the names of the members of the proposed commission with broad responsibilities and make suggestions to address the situation in the future. The order was passed on three identical petitions - filed by the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research, the Sindh High Court Bar Association and civil rights campaigner Rana Faizul Hasan - for action against the officials responsible for the tragedy that led to the deaths of more than 200 people.

The chief secretary later constituted the commission but the court suspended the notification and issued a contempt notice to the chief secretary to explain why he had formed the commission on his own.

On Thursday, Malik defended the constitution of the commission by Hotiana. The bench, headed by Chief Justice Maqbool Baqar, asked the AG to submit a detailed argument by the next date of hearing.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 30^th, 2014.