Guantanamo Bay prisoners: Court seeks report from government

Petitioner says committee lackadaisical on issue of Pakistani detainees

ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad High Court (IHC) on Monday sought a report from the inter-ministerial committee about the steps it has taken to look into the issue of prisoners detained at the US-run Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba. 

During hearing of an intra-court appeal filed by petitioner Mohammad Shafi against dismissal of a case by an IHC single bench earlier, the IHC bench comprising Justice Noorul Haq Qureshi and Justice Aamer Farooq directed standing counsel Khawaja Imtiaz to submit a performance report of the committee about the prisoners’ issue within a week. The bench also asked whether the committee was actually doing anything for the prisoners.

On June 18, the IHC single bench dismissed the petition as not-maintainable.

In the intra-court appeal, the petitioner, through his counsel Mirza Shahzad Akbar, has requested the court to set aside the single bench’s order as the court failed to exercise its jurisdiction properly, acted beyond its scope vested by the law and misread the parties’ pleas.

The petitioner has approached the court saying that his brother-in-law, Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani, was among many Pakistanis picked up by Pakistan intelligences agencies from Karachi in Dec 2001 and handed over to the US authorities in Jan 2002 without charges.

In Aug 2003, Rabbani was transferred to Bagram prison in Afghanistan and in January 2004, he was shifted to Guantanamo Bay, where he has been receiving terrible treatment till now, the petitioner contended.

The petitioner’s counsel informed the court that a report released by the US Senate Committee on Intelligence in December 2014 said that Rabbani was taken by the CIA on mistaken identity, mistaking him for a high-ranking Al-Qaida leader Hassan Gul.

In 2014, the prime minister constituted an inter-ministerial committee to examine and take up the issue of seeking release of Pakistani prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.

The petitioner has alleged that the committee was a mere ‘smoke-screen’. He said that the reality was that the committee has not contacted any detainee or with their family. He said that he wrote a letter to the committee but got no response till date.

The petitioner made ministries of interior, defence, foreign affairs and former president General (retired) Pervez Musharraf as respondents.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 15^th, 2015.