ISLAMABAD: Dr Shireen Mazari, Pakistan’s Human Rights Minister, reported on Monday that a recently enacted National Assembly (NA) law on enforced disappearances has been misplaced. At the Ministry of Human Rights, she told reporters: “We had developed the law on missing individuals. The [relevant] standing committee and the National Assembly passed it.” Even after being delivered to the Senate, the document went missing.
The Minister stated that there had been allegations that the bill was sent to the Senate’s Secretariat.
On November 8, 2021, the National Assembly enacted the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill 2021, which aims to reform the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and the Code of Criminal Procedure.
In June 2021, the Minister of the Interior presented it to the National Assembly for consideration. However, even though the law originally included no provision for a person subjected to enforced disappearance, it is now a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in jail and a fine of Rs500,000. This provision got later introduced, and it made enforced disappearances a criminal offence. It will revise section 52B of the PPC to include a definition of “enforced disappearance” under the proposed legislation.
An individual who has been illegally detained, abducted, or otherwise deprived of liberty without lawful authority by an agent of the state is referred to as an “enforced disappearance,” and the term refers to any form of deprivation of liberty that is followed by a refusal to recognise the deprivation of liberty or by concealing the whereabouts of the disappeared person, which places such a person outside the protection of the law.
Human rights organisations, like Amnesty International and the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, have long called for enacting legislation criminalising “enforced disappearances” in Pakistan.
In recent years, the practice of abducting people under the guise of combating terrorists and rebels has spread to the major cities around Pakistan, including Islamabad.
While the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, founded in March 2011, has located many of the missing people, activists believe it has failed to identify and convict those responsible.
Over 2,000 unresolved cases are believed to still be in the hands of the commission.
A search for inmates’ personal information is underway.
Shireen Mazari said that her government has requested information from the provinces on inmates who are still imprisoned because they could not pay penalties levied on them. Prisoners who have not paid their penalties are being held in prisons across the country, and the Ministry of Human Rights is getting their information from provinces, she added.
Mazari said that Maryam Nawaz was granted bail soon, but some cases take years to resolve.
