ISLAMABAD, Jan 7: Leading human rights campaigners and intellectuals in Pakistan have questioned the government’s plan to set up military courts to try terror suspects in the aftermath of the Peshawar school massacre.
Pakistan’s Parliament has yesterday passed legislation allowing military courts to try insurgents. Lawmakers from religious parties and an opposition party led by former cricketer Imran Khan stayed away. It will stay on the books for two years, allowing military courts to try anyone accused of terrorism offences. The move represents a failure of civilian government and is fraught with risks, activists say.
The step is the latest in a range of measures announced following the December 16 incident in which Taliban militants killed at least 152 people, most of them children, at the Army Public School.
“The military courts are being created because the army chief of staff is angry that an army school has been attacked,” constitutional expert Abid Hassan Minto said. “We understand his anger but then the question arises that why did not we see that anger when more than 100 minority Shia Hazaras were killed in Quetta or when 127 Christian men, women and children were killed in a church in Peshawar last year?” Activists and writers say the new measures are fraught with risk.
Journalist and writer Ahmed Rashid said the issue was transparency.
Some mainstream political parties initially opposed the idea of military courts on the basis that these courts could be misused to pressurise political opponents and could lead to human rights violations, particularly in Baluchistan province where some nationalist parties are fighting for separation from Pakistan.
Many analysts believe the military courts represent the failure of a civilian government unable to fulfil its democratic responsibilities and gradually ceding its mandate to the army. “It’s very unfortunate that there is only one organised institution in this country and that is the military. They can do their homework and come up with solutions, whether we like them or not,” political commentator Najam Sethi said.
(AGENCIES)
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