ISLAMABAD: A legislative body of the Upper House of parliament on Wednesday regretted that still such type of mindset exists that believed in disrespecting women, however, the government should ensure justice to the victim family.
The Human Rights Committee of Senate held its meeting on Wednesday and discussed the incident of Dera Ismail Khan, where a girl was stripped and paraded through streets of Dera Ismail Khan on the verdict of a Jirga. The victim’s family expressed dissatisfaction over the briefing of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police. The committee was informed that the real culprit of the sad incident still could not arrest. The committee directed the conc
erned police that the culprits should be arrested as soon as possible and exemplary punishment should be given to them.
The senators expressed astonishment over the existence of people who follow the area of ignorance and disrespect women. They also said that the DI Khan incident was very sad and the victim family should be provided justice.
The committee also discussed two bills namely, “The transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2017 moved by Senator Karim Ahmed Khawaja and “The transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill 2017 moved by Senators Rubina Khalid, Rubina Irfan, Samina Saeed and Kalsoom Parveen. Both bills referred to next meeting with suggestions to movers for presenting more solid steps for the rights of transgender.
The committee also discussed the reports of curbs on civil society actors mainly INGOs, and NGOs working in areas of Human Rights, social justice, rule of law and enforced disappearances.
Taking part in the discussion, Senator Farhatullah Babar said that handing over the task of registration of NGOs to security agencies was like asking the wolf to guard the lamb and called for rooting registration of NGOs as well as accountability of state agencies in legislation instead of executive order.
He said that policy framework to deal with civil society organizations must be rooted in legislation and not by security agencies accused of human rights violations and excesses against citizens.
It must find a place in the annals of world record that the fate of NGOs working for the recovery of missing persons is in the hands of those very agencies accused of involvement in enforced disappear
ances and also are not accountable, he said.
He said that previously the EAD used to deal with the registration of INGOs. But now the interior ministry dealt with it through a committee that also included the ISI. As a result more than half of the over one hundred INGOs that had applied for registration were disallowed to operate in the country he said quoting from a reply to a question rec
ently as
ked in the Senate..
It has been claimed that the new policy was based on Fatemi report but the report was never made public and demanded that it be made public, he said. We need to have appropriate legislation for the smooth working of NGOs and at the same time there is need for legislation to regulate the workings of state agencies he said and reminded that the Senate Committee of the Whole had endorsed a
draft Bill for this purpose.
He asked the government to come out clean on the recommendations of the Committee of the Whole and explain reasons why it was unable to bring the agencies under some legislation. He said that Pakistan was a signatory to international conventions on civil society organizations and warned that not implementation of the promises made result in serious embarrassment at the time of GSP plus review.
Published in Daily Times, January 4th 2018.
