No cases were dropped under NRO, SC told

Three provinces say that no case, including criminal cases against govt officials, has been dropped under NRO.

ISLAMABAD: Three provinces formally are said to have informed the ministry of law and justice that no case, including criminal cases against any government official, has been dropped under the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO).

The provinces have sent their replies to the authorities concerned last week via their home departments.

On September 29, the Supreme Court had directed the attorney-general to ask provinces for details of some 8,000 cases which had allegedly been dropped under the NRO, promulgated in 2007 by  General Pervez Musharraf. The court issued the orders in a suo motu case filed by Adnan Khwaja and Ahmad Riaz Sheikh against the government.

However, the Sindh government has not submitted a reply to the office of the attorney-general despite the lapse of six weeks. The province has not given any reason for the delay.

Meanwhile, Sindh’s Prosecutor-General Shahadat Awan had verbally informed the law ministry and the office of the attorney-general last week that although courts in Sindh had been directed to drop cases under NRO, no criminal case had been dropped under the scraped law.

The report on the provinces’ replies will be submitted before the Supreme Court as it reconstitutes the bench to take up the NRO implementation case likely to be heard in the first week of December. Of the 8,000 cases under the NRO, some 77 cases were from Punjab, 171 cases from Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, while in Sindh around 7,793 people are said to have benefitted under Article 2 of the NRO.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 15^th, 2010.