Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: The Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (ColoED), has traced a total of 1578 missing persons that disappeared from different provinces of the country, by June 2016. However, 1367 persons are still missing across the country and their cases are pending with the commission, read a report of CoIoED received here on Saturday.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was on the top of all the provinces, with 1345 missing persons cases, out of which 684 were still unsolved.

The report stated that a total of 3428 cases of missing persons were registered up to June 2016 with the ColoED since it start working and the commission had disposed of 2061 cases. About 60 new cases of missing persons were registered during the last month of June and 44 cases were disposed of during the same month.

The cases of 245 persons were deleted due to no enforced disappearance and 238 cases were deleted from the commission owing to several other reasons. The report said that the commission held 241 proceedings of the cases last month. About 164 hearings were held in Islamabad while 77 proceedings were in Karachi. The 334 missing persons who had been traced so far were belong to Punjab province, 477 Sindh, 573 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), 100 Balochistan, 42 FATA, 12 Azad Jammu Kashmir and 40 persons were from Islamabad Capital Territory, the report revealed.

However, 211 people missing from Punjab, 34 ICT, 269 of Sindh, 684 KPK, 112 Balochistan, 41 FATA, 15 AJK and one from Gilgit Batistan are still untraced. The commission had registered a total of 3442 cases of missing persons out of which 107 belonged to ICT, 678 Punjab, 902 Sindh, 1345 KPK, 263 Balochistan, FATA 96, AJK 36 and one from GB.

The Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances was established in March 2011 under the chairmanship of Justice (Reted) Javed Iqbal to trace out the missing persons with the help of law enforcement agencies. Proceedings of the Commission were being held in Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi and Quetta periodically.

It may be mentioned here that the Inquiry commission also came under criticism a few months ago when complainants expressed their disappointment over its performance before the Supreme Court.

Talking to Daily Times, a senior lawyer associated with the missing persons case at the Supreme Court, Hashmat Habib Advocate said the inquiry commission had failed to meet its objective of recovering enforced disappeared people from the country. Not a single person was recovered with the efforts of this commission, he claimed, saying that persons who were released after clearance from the law enforcement agencies, or found involved in any case or recovered dead bodies, were included in the traced list of Inquiry commission.