Govt railroads NRO through NA committee
SLAMABAD: The National Reconciliation bill was cleared for tabling in the lower house after majority of the 17-member National Assembly’s committee on law and justice adopted on Friday the NRO bill of 2009 with some amendments.
Opposition parties termed the bill’s passage bulldozing by the treasury and the PML-N boycotted final stages of the committee meeting while the PML-Q opposed the legislation.
On Thursday, PML-Q lawmakers urged the government to produce a list of beneficiaries, including people who had been exonerated even in murder and dacoity cases, to the committee. The request went unheeded.
According to insiders, PML-N and PML-Q lawmakers put up a stiff resistance to the clause-by-clause adoption of the bill after it was decided to remove Clause 4 and 5, binding police to get permission from parliament’s committee before arresting any lawmaker.
The bill’s seventh clause was also amended, necessitating all accused to get themselves acquitted through courts.
Begum Nasim Chaudhry of the PPP, who chaired the meeting, said that clauses one, two, three and seven had been adopted and clauses four and five removed and the seventh had been amended.
Zahid Hamid of the PML-N said his party had opposed every clause of the bill, while PML-Q lawmakers vowed to resist it wherever it was presented.
PML-Q’s Amir Muqam staged a walkout against what he called the government’s refusal to identify people who had benefited under the NRO and their party affiliations.
He said: ‘I told the committee that NRO was promulgated after an agreement between PPP’s Benazir Bhutto and former president Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf under which the former was to become prime minister and the latter to remain president for five years, but it became void after the death of the PPP chairperson.
‘We believe that the NRO became irrelevant and not binding on … anyone who could benefit from it.’
Agencies add: The committee recommended that the bill should not be restricted to public office holders and should include other politically-victimised people, adding that victimisation of public office holders should be stopped.
It was observed that public office holders were even physically and mentally tortured without due process of law or justification.
Members of the committee said the ordinance had been promulgated to promote reconciliation and to ensure transparency in elections, besides allowing federal or provincial governments to withdraw cases before the pronouncement of a judgment.
Otherwise it might be done by a review board on the basis of the record. An equal opportunity, the committee said, should be provided to public office holders from all political parties who had been falsely implicated in fake cases.
The meeting was attended by Syed Naveed Qamar, Minister for Petroleum and Natural Resources, Justice (retd) Fakharun Nisa Khokher, Chaudhry Abdul Ghafoor, Syed Zafar Ali Shah, Shakila Khanam Rasheed, Tariq Shabbir, Zahid Hamid, Justice (retd) Iftikhar Ahmed Cheema, Anusha Rahman Khan, Saira Afzal Tarar, Mohammad Raza Hayat Hiraj, Amir Muqam, S.A. Iqbal Qadri and Saeed Ahmed Zafar.
Members of the MQM and Riaz Futyana abstained from the voting.
Later, Zahid Hamid said that there were seven votes in favour of the bill while six legislators voted against it. The clauses were adopted without debate, he added. PML-Q’s forward bloc also stayed away.
The committee decided NRO should be enforced retrospectively from Oct 5, 2007.
DAWN.COM | Pakistan | Govt railroads NRO through NA committee
......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Surprisingly..Altaf advises President Zardari to resign KARACHI: The chief of Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) Altaf Hussain has decided to oppose NRO in the Parliament and advice President Asif Ali Zardari to quit as president.
