March 29, 2018: CODE PAKISTAN held a consultative session with senior government officials to seek their feedback on a report on prison overcrowding with special reference to pre-conviction detention that it has recently submitted to the National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA). The report is a product of a year-long effort that commenced after CODE PAKISTAN was assigned the task by NACTA in April 2017. During the time CODE PAKISTAN has been working on the report, it has gathered statistics on the numbers of prisoners in all the prisons of the four provinces and two Administrative Territories (ATs) disaggregated by judicial status, age, and gender, as well as various statistics on police, prosecution services, and the judiciary, with the support of NACTA. Besides conducting a thorough review of national and international reports, journals, and news articles on the subject matter, as well as relevant decisions, rulings, orders, regulations, and laws applicable in Pakistan, the report relies extensively on the expertise of serving criminal justice officials.
The consultation held today was the last of a long sequence of interactions with government officials at various levels. CODE PAKISTAN has held four consultations with senior-level criminal justice officials in Islamabad prior to today’s event. CODE PAKISTAN has also held two consultations with senior-level members of the judiciary in Peshawar and Islamabad; five consultations with senior-level lawyers of the Islamabad Bar, as well as the four provincial Bar Councils; and interviewed 18 senior-level serving criminal justice officials in their offices in the federal capital, as well as the four provincial capitals, with the support of NACTA.
The purpose of today’s consultation with senior-level government officials was to seek their feedback on the recommendations given in the report one more time before its finalization. Today’s consultation was widely attended not only by the criminal justice officials from the executive branch of the government but also from the judiciary. Representatives of the police, prisons, and prosecution departments, as well as the judiciary, from Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, and Sindh were represented at the event. The consultation resulted in a very candid and fruitful exchange on the findings and recommendations of the report.
CODE PAKISTAN would like to thank NACTA for its support in holding the consultations as well as all the participants of the consultations for their valuable contributions to the consultations. We would also like to thank the participants coming from the four provinces, as well as AJK and GB for traveling all the way to Islamabad for the consultations.