A Supreme Court bench has given the government two weeks to furnish a detailed report regarding the whereabouts of the missing persons, failing which it would issue orders on all the cases. The court made it known that it would deliver the verdict on the case this month.
"The law will take its course irrespective of who is who," said the presiding judge, who promised to "go to any extent, under constitutional provisions, and bring the matter to its logical end". Interior, foreign and defence secretaries were directed to appear in the court on March 18 and present their final arguments regarding the efforts made so far in tracing the missing persons.
The order has come after failure by the departments concerned to present a detailed and genuine statement regarding the persons in the intelligence agencies custody. Except for stray cases, the phenomenon of "involuntary disappearances," sometime referred to as "forced disappearances," was unknown in Pakistan before the Musharraf era.
With the hunt for al Qaeda's supporters and a round-up of militants suspected of involvement in attempts on Musharraf's life, the situation started changing. By the end of 2004, human rights bodies were forced to take up the issue, as the number of persons picked up and detained by the agencies, in violation of legal requirements, continued to rise.
The government initially maintained that these persons had voluntarily disappeared to join the jihad or in pursuit of some other designs. By 2006, additional evidence started to come in that refuted the government's position. With the number of involuntary disappearances from Balochistan, where religious extremism among the Baloch population was unknown, outnumbering those from the other provinces, the government's position became all the more untenable.
In 2006, the Sindh High Court was told that as the ministries had no control over the operations of the intelligence agencies, they could not help the court beyond communicating its wishes to these agencies and bringing back their responses. At the beginning of 2007, the matter came up before the Supreme Court.
At each hearing, the administration claimed to have traced a few of the missing persons but the number was insignificant. Hearings continued even after Musharraf's assault on the judiciary. But after November 3, 2007, the date of Musharraf's second coup, the case was completely shelved.
Hearings were resumed after the restoration of the present SC. As foot dragging by the related departments continued, the three-member SC bench hearing the petitions started to hold weekly sittings and finally decided to deliver its verdict before the end of March.
One can well imagine the plight of those who have been deprived of their freedom and are being kept incognito, in some cases for the last several years. The concerned government departments have yet to tell the courts how many of them were handed over to other countries without due process.
Their family members have been running from pillar to post, holding press conferences, taking out protest marches, approaching parliamentarians and filing petitions in the courts without being able to get their grievances redressed. They do not even know if the person picked up by the agencies is alive or dead.
As a fairly large number of the missing persons were the sole breadwinners of their families, their dependants were left with nothing to subsist on. Their stories appearing in the media are heartrending. Some of these families have filed petitions in courts demanding economic support from the government.
While the performance of the security agencies in dealing with terrorism is commendable, there is a need on their part to realise that noble ends do not justify recourse to means that violate constitutional guarantees provided to the citizens and laws existing on the statute book.
The agencies are within their right to question the suspects in accordance with the law, which requires a formal arrest of the accused person by the competent authority, his production in a court of law within a specified time limit, where he is to be duly charged and remanded in custody for a specified number of days. What the SC has asked for all along, is to release those taken into custody without due process and to follow the prescribed laws in case there is need for a suspect's interrogation.
Besides being a matter of grave concern for humanitarian reasons, the issue of missing persons is of immense importance for national integrity. Involuntary disappearances, which have continued unabated under the present government also, have added a major complaint to those that were already being voiced by the people of Balochistan. The SC has taken great pains to try to resolve the issue. There is a need on the part of the ministries and agencies concerned to fully cooperate with the apex court.