Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Pakistanis are most vulnerable to get caught in the web of criminal justice system in the Middle East but there is no structured plan to assist these hapless Pakistanis.

This was stated by Senator Farhatullah Babar at the launch of a report titled Caught in the Web – Treatment of Pakistanis Caught in the Criminal Justice System of Saudi Arabia by the Justice Project of Pakistan at a local hotel in Islamabad on Wednesday.

A state like Pakistan which itself has no respect for a citizen’s life and whose own record of broken criminal justice system is pathetic cannot be expected to stand for the life and liberty of its citizens caught on the wrong side of the law in Saudi Arabia or anywhere, he said.

About the harsh criminal justice system in Saudi Arabia, he recalled the incident of a Pakistani Abdul Ghafoor who landed at Medina’s airport on August 18, 2016 and disappeared the next day and remains untraced even today.

He said that the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate proposed that investigations in the missing Pakistani case started from the point when Abdul Ghafoor had an altercation with a police official at the gate of Masjid Nabvi and was whisked away and since then was not seen.

The deafening silence of the Saudi authorities show how Pakistanis caught in the web of Saudi criminal justice system may even disappear without a trace.

Farhatullah Babar then requested National Commission of Human Rights Chairman Justice Chowhan to take the case forward from the point the Senate Committee left it unfinished.

He recalled the decree issued by the famous cleric late Shaikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz in the 1980s ordering the removal of copies of holy Quran printed in Pakistan from mosques because these were proof read by a person named Aslam bin Allah Ditta.

“God has no children and the proof reader claiming to be a son of Allah is blasphemy,” said the order letter circulated to the mosques by the kingdom’s interior ministry. There was no investigation and the Pakistani embassy was not even given an opportunity to state the correct position, he said.

Citing another example, he mentioned that not too long ago, two brothers having spent years on death row were acquitted by the Supreme Court only after they had actually been hanged, he said.

The foremost condition for seeking justice for Pakistanis abroad is to give them justice in your own country, he said.

Babar proposed the setting up of a special cell in the ministry of Foreign Affairs to deal with issues in Pakistanis in jails in foreign countries. He proposed bilateral agreements so that prisoners could be transferred to serve their term in prisons of their home country and also for the transportation of dead bodies of executed prisoners.

Published in Daily Times, March 8^th 2018.