Staff Report
ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) called upon the caretaker prime minister and the chief election commissioner on Tuesday to take immediate action in recovering their forcibly disappeared leaders and workers.
In separate letters addressed to PM Anwaarul Haq Kakar and CEC Sikandar Sultan Raja, PTI’s Secretary General Omar Ayub Khan raised alarm over the mysterious disappearance of the party’s key leaders and workers. As per Khan’s letter, copies of the letters have also been shared with the provincial chief ministers.
In his letter, Khan has highlighted names of PTI leaders whose whereabouts are currently unknown. These include Farrukh Habib, Sadaqat Abbasi, Usman Dar, Owais Younis, Irfan Saleem, Abdul Karim Khan, and Awami Muslim League (AML) Chief Sheikh Rashid.
The PTI leader has termed the issue of enforced disappearances as the “most serious of all the viola-tions of the law and the Constitution” and “the most blatant and open form of pre-poll rigging” in the context of preparation for a ‘free, fair and impartial election’.
Omar stated that the enforced disappearance of these individuals was a blatant violation of the fun-damental rights enshrined in Pakistan’s Constitution. He underscored the urgent need for their release and for those responsible for these disappearances to be brought to justice.
The letter further states that, “This campaign, with the sole purpose of trying to break PTI, Pakistan’s most popular political party, also makes a complete mockery of the Election Act 2017. In the context of the very primary responsibility of caretaker governments to hold free and fair elections, this campaign of enforced disappearances violates Section.230 (1)(d) in which the Caretaker Government has a duty to “be impartial to every person and political party”, and Section. 186 (d), in which no official can exe-cute any act “calculated to influence the result of the election”.
“Finally, these enforced disappearances also contravene Pakistan’s commitments on several interna-tional covenants and treaties that deal with such matters, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), as well as the International Convention for the Protection of All Per-sons from Enforced Disappearance (CED), which is obligatory upon Pakistan under customary interna-tional law principles,” Khan reminds the caretaker chief minister in his letter.
