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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Pakistan
Index
Independence had little impact on the police forces,
which,
like the military, simply switched their allegiance from
the
British to a new, indigenous regime. The great mass of
police
work remained the same, and the political role of the
police in
supporting the British soon found a parallel in
independent
Pakistan, as the regime was itself beset by political
disturbances and extended the definition of crime to
include such
antistate activities as terrorism and subversion. Even
though the
forces of law and order had become the instruments of an
indigenous government, any significant advantages that had
accrued from the changeover have largely been dissipated.
Public attitudes toward the police, historically
regarded
with distrust and fear, have not changed; indeed, the
police are
held in low esteem. In British times, the Indian Police
Service--
the predecessor of the PSP--was nearly incorruptible and
was
fairly immune from political pressure that did not emanate
from
London. Since independence, however, politicization of the
police
has become increasingly pervasive. Corruption in the lower
ranks
has proliferated and permeated the PSP; in the frequent
periods
when Pakistan was under oppressive rule, the police were
as
repressive as they were in British times.
Police tactics in British India were never gentle, but
in
contemporary Pakistan, according to the Herald, a
magazine
published in Karachi, "The police have institutionalized
torture
to a point where it is viewed as the primary method of
crime
detention. Police torture has become so commonplace that
it has
slowly lost the capacity to shock and disgust." These
charges
were echoed by Amnesty International's especially bleak
appraisal
of Pakistan's human rights situation in its June 1992
"International News Release" report. The report,
reflecting the
law and order breakdown in Sindh and the government's
reaction to
it, stated that government opponents often are harassed,
placed
under arrest, and detained for unspecified periods of
time.
Scores of prisoners of conscience have been held for their
political activities or religious beliefs. The practice of
repeatedly bringing false charges against members of the
political opposition is a widely used tactic in Pakistani
politics and has been used to arrest thousands of
opposition
party activists. According to the United States State
Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices
for
1993, there were no significant efforts in 1992 or
1993 to
reform either the police or the judicial system, and
authorities
continued to be lax in their prosecution of abuses in
these
areas. Pakistani and international human rights
organizations
have demanded that steps be taken to reverse the trend by
bringing torturers to justice and by taking such
procedural steps
as reducing the time prisoners spend in places of first
arrest,
where most torture takes place.
Torture is a particularly acute problem in cases in
which the
suspect is thought to have committed a political crime,
but it is
not uncommon in serious criminal cases. General police
brutality
in handling all suspects is routine. Police frequently act
without warrants or other proper authorization, and
individuals
disappear into the criminal justice process for weeks
before they
can be found and, through writs of habeas corpus, be
brought into
regular judicial channels. Rape of prisoners, both male
and
female, is common. Prisoners often die in detention but
are
reported as killed in the course of armed encounters.
Police also
are alleged to extort money from families of prisoners
under
threat of ill treatment. The performance of the police and
their
failure to act against political groups that run their own
torture machinery are especially bad in Sindh, but there
is no
Pakistani who looks on an encounter with the police with
equanimity.
Amnesty International and other human rights groups
welcomed
the establishment in 1993 of a Human Rights Commission by
the
interim government of Moeen Qureshi and recommended to his
successor, Benazir Bhutto, that the new government
investigate
past torture cases and enforce safeguards against the use
of
torture. Despite continued trouble in Sindh, observers
have
discerned what appears to be a genuine interest by the
current
government in addressing some of the more egregious human
rights
problems endemic in Pakistan today.
Data as of April 1994
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