ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Senator Farhatullah Babar has said that under international law enforced disappearance was a crime against humanity and warned that one day the world might wake up and take notice of the impunity with which people continue to disappear in the country without a trace.
Like FATF and sheltering militant organizations it will be yet another albatross around the neck and the state must act before that happened, Baber said while addressing a protest demonstration in front of National Press Club in Islamabad on Monday evening organized by the Defence of Human Rights and civil society organizations to observe the international day of the disappeared.
Relatives of the victims of the disappeared narrated their woes at the gathering.
Farhatullah Babar said that the cancer spread fast after General Musharraf admitted in his memoirs that he had sent hundreds of people to the CIA and earned millions of dollars.
Since then the enforced disappearances has been institutionalized and neither the Parliament, nor the judiciary nor any civilian government was able to do anything about it.
He said that Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari had on this day two years ago promised to make legislation to criminalize disappearances but there has not been able to do anything.
The PPP Senator said, “I do not blame Shireen Mazari for this failure. Perhaps any Minister would have failed. I say this to emphasize that the perpetrators of enforced disappearances were more powerful than all state institutions.”
He said that the impunity of crime was frightening as not a single perpetrator had been held to account.
More than two thousand missing persons had been traced by the Commission on enforced Disappearance whose Chairman admitted before the Senate committee on Human Rights in August 208 that 153 state functionaries had been identified as involved in the crime.
The impunity with which the crime continues despite these facts is frightening, he said. Times and tides change and one day those responsible will have to account for their misdeeds, he warned.
With input from INP
