Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: The government’s FATA Reforms Package has turned out to be a mere delusion to deceive the tribesmen and their representatives, Senator Farhatullah Babar said on Thursday.

Taking part in a discussion on FATA reforms in the Senate, Babar said that the reforms package was approved by the Cabinet on March 2. “However, the government has not brought the constitutional amendment bill needed to extend the jurisdiction of high court and Supreme Court of Pakistan to the tribal areas as promised. Subsequently, the package was withdrawn from the Parliament itself. Then the word merger was quietly changed to mainstreaming FATA in the official discourse,” he said.

“Some government ministers claimed that the military was against the reforms. However, the military later clarified that it favoured the reforms,” Babar said.

“The last nail in the coffin of the so called reforms proved to be the fact that they were not even mentioned in the budget speech. No fund was allocated for it,” he said.

“A Peshawar High Court verdict proposed Constitutional amendment to extend the jurisdiction of superior courts to FATA. A private member’s bill about this verdict has been passed unanimously by the Senate Committee on Law and Justice,” he said.

“Some people oppose the reforms because they fear that it will no longer be possible for them to dominate political discourse in a reformed FATA merged with KP,” he said. He also warned against the proposed Riwaj Act, saying that its adoption in the present form would amount to reincarnation of the draconian Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) through the Parliament instead of abolishing it,” he said.

He asked the Senate chairman to immediately re-convene the meeting of Senate Committee of the Whole to suggest a way forward on all aspects of proposed reforms.

Published in Daily Times, July 21^st, 2017.