Asian Human Rights Commission , 20 November 2009.
It may have a recently-restored judiciary and an elected government that claims a strong interest in the rule of law, but Pakistan is seeing little progress in the hundreds of missing persons cases still pending. Pakistanis continue to be regularly ‘disappeared’ after arrest.
With the police force exposed as increasingly negligent and corrupt, the responsibility of identifying such cases and intervening has long fallen to the judiciary. Judges taking suo moto action have secured the rescue of numerous persons from illegal military detention in the recent past, and this is widely believed to have been a major motive behind the sacking of the Supreme Court judges in 2007 by then-President and Army Chief, Pervez Musharraf. Yet despite the restoration of the Judiciary with its Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry in March after a long civil struggle and with the support of current Chief of Army Staff General Kiyani, there has been…