RSF report a charge-sheet against govt: PML-N

Reporters Without Borders, also known as Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF)

The Newspaper's Staff Reporter

Published July 6, 2021 -

This combo photo shows Prime Minister Imran Khan and Indian PM Narendra Modi.

 — Reuters/File

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) information secretary Marriyum Aurangzeb has claimed that the latest report of the Reporters Without Borders is a charge-sheet against the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) government.

In a statement on Monday, she said Imran Khan’s alleged “authoritarian attitude” and character was defiling Pakistan’s image abroad.

Ms Aurangzeb said the global community had unequivocally condemned the government’s suppression of the freedom of expression.

“The report says that the PTI government is worse than military dictatorships in Pakistan when it comes to press freedom. The Human Rights Watch, Pakistan Press Freedom Report and Freedom Network Report had already declared the Imran government as the worst media gagging administration in the history of the country,” she said.

Ms Aurangzeb said the latest report of the Reporters Without Borders had exposed the “predatory behaviour” of the government. She said the actions by the PTI government had not only reflected negatively on Pakistan’s journalism but also adversely affected the country’s position when it came to Financial Action Task Force and the GSP Plus status by the European Union.

Ms Aurangzeb said the report pointed out that newspaper distribution and news channel broadcasting were hampered by the PTI government.

“It mentions that journalists are harassed, abducted and assaulted for crossing the red lines defined by the state. The report also pointed out that freedom of expression on social media is also being curbed through new dark and draconian laws,” she said while quoting from the report.

RSF Report

Reporters Without Borders, also known as Reporters Sans Frontiers (RSF), on its official website has published “a gallery of grim portraits, those of 37 heads of state or government who launched a crackdown massively on press freedom” under the caption “RSF’s 2021: Press freedom predators gallery – old tyrants, two women and a European.”

“There are now 37 leaders from around the world in RSF’s predators of press freedom gallery and no one could say this list is exhaustive,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

Besides Prime Minister Imran Khan, the RSF list includes Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Chinese President Xi Jingping, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Tajik President Emamoli Rakhmon, Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, King of Bahrain Hamed bin Isa Al Khalifa and Supreme Leader of North Korea Kim Jong-un.

Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2021

The new kingdom

Even before the pandemic, Saudi Arabia had faced the challenge of training its citizenry to become workers.

Rafia Zakaria

Published July 7, 2021 -

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.


ABOUT a decade ago, the rulers of Saudi Arabia faced some difficult truths. Fossil fuels, experts must have told them, were increasingly a losing bet. The dark liquid that they extracted from the earth would not bring in the millions and billions so unfailingly as it did in decades past.

The Western world had developed a moral argument against the use of polluting fossil fuels; a burgeoning climate movement was critical of the limitless use of oil, depicting it as the polluting enemy that was eating up the once clean air of towns and cities. This was terrible news for the kingdom, and its long tradition of relying on the Western consumer market gobbling up what it had to sell. With the Americans extracting their own oil through fracking and developing electric cars in the meantime, the days of oil kings were waning fast. The Saudis, the world’s richest purveyors of oil, would have to change and change fast.

The pandemic has, in all sorts of unexpected ways, hastened the need for this drastic transformation. For over a year, most of the Western world was stilled by lockdowns, and airlines, major consumers of oil, were nearly grounded as people sat in their homes to save their lives. Work from home implementation by hundreds of companies meant that few were commuting, reducing the demand for oil. Add to this a cavalcade of climate disasters that substantiated how careless and gluttonous the old oil-run world had been and the end of oil was in sight. Avoiding fossil fuels became part of the political agenda in much of the Western world and lowering the carbon footprint part of the definition of being a good citizen.

Even before the pandemic, the kingdom had faced the challenge of training its citizenry to become workers who saw money as something that had to be earned rather than divvied up by the oil-fattened state. Their solution was ‘nitaqat’ or ‘Saudisation’, a phased project that would send home the nearly 80 per cent of the workforce made up of immigrants from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Saudi nationals would replace them.

Even before the pandemic, Saudi Arabia had faced the challenge of training its citizenry to become workers.

The Saudis recently released the details of the second phase of the Saudisation programme whose goal is to make 340,000 jobs available to Saudi citizens.

As with the first phase of the nitaqat programme this is being done by designating a long list of jobs as reserved for Saudis only. The first list of restrictions in this programme had included drivers, food-service workers, security staff and many other designations. The second newly released list also includes white-collar jobs such as those in law and the provision of legal advice, real estate, customs and clearance, cinema, driving schools, as well as technology and engineering professions.

To get Saudi men and women into the workforce, an agenda of social reforms is also being pursued to support the larger project of transforming Saudis into workers. Last month, the kingdom decreed that women could live alone and independently without the presence of a male guardian. Saudi women, many of whom are better educated than their male counterparts, have already been permitted to drive and recently even to perform Haj with other female travellers rather than with a male guardian. There is no doubt that all of this is directed at making women part of this newly envisioned workforce.

Sadly, what is good for Saudi women, long neglected and left to suffer under misogynist laws and directives, is not very good for Pakistani workers. A look at remittances, which make up a significant percentage of Pakistan’s GDP, reveals that Pakistani workers in Saudi Arabia send back billions of dollars. A great number of the nearly 2m Pakistani workers in the kingdom, it appears, will now be returning home, if they are not already here. Even if some manage to cling to their pre-nitaqat jobs it will only be the case until a trained Saudi worker can be found to do whatever they do. It can be concluded that the process of eliminating them has already begun.

Read: Pakistan beat India, Bangladesh in manpower export in 2020: ministry

The government of Pakistan, enriched as it is by the money sent home by Pakistanis working in Saudi Arabia, must step in. The prime minister’s last visit to Saudi Arabia did not seem to produce any welcome news, not even some momentary exception for Pakistani workers that would soften the blow of the eventual drying up of jobs. Where will these Pakistani workers, once uprooted, go? How will the shortfall in remittances be made up? These are all open questions for which the government of Pakistan does not seem to have a satisfactory answer.

Pakistan too needs to prepare for the economy of the future. Travel restrictions based on health reasons or in the case of the kingdom, a transforming economy, are here to stay. The world’s increased reliance on the automated and virtual sectors means that data analysis and management jobs, most of which will be remote, will proliferate. Pakistani workers should be trained to take advantage of this emerging market. Incentives must be provided to entrepreneurs who can work with foreign companies on projects in the ballooning virtual sector. Similar investment incentives must be given to countries who can invest in Pakistan’s emerging technology sector.

All kingdoms and countries look out for themselves with the resources they have at hand. Naturally, Pakistan’s ability to do so is limited primarily by its resources but also by a lack of policy foresight and of concern for the well-being of Pakistanis toiling in Saudi Arabia. Some of these, like resource poverty, are inherited conditions; the rest are the consequences of the decades-long apathy demonstrated by a parade of self-interested and short-sighted rulers.

It is a pity that Pakistanis are adept at quoting the Saudis in matters of faith, but none of them have yet inquired where Pakistan’s nitaqat programme is. What is our Vision 2030?

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 7th, 2021

PAKISTAN

Imran Khan — once cricketer, now prime minister, unbudgeable rape apologist?




IMAGES EDITORIAL


The premier clarified his opinions on rape and temptation and it confirmed what everyone already knew — he's a rape apologist.

Well Captain, you've done it again. Despite your ministers, avid supporters and other party members scrambling to defend you the last time you were a rape apologist, you've proven that you do indeed blame women for rape.

You didn't let anyone change your mind — not public outcry, not international horror, not even your supporters twisting your words to mask your meaning. And this time, you spoke in English, leaving no room for ambiguity.

We would commend you for staying true to yourself if only the words you uttered weren't so problematic.

Women across Pakistan can rest assured that if someone rapes them, our prime minister will say it was the fault of "temptation", not the rapist. Would the same apply to children?

In an interview to Jonathan Swan for Axios, the premier was asked about his earlier comments about temptation, women's dressing and men's "willpower” — and how he was accused of rape victim blaming.

Imran, brushing it off as nonsense, said the concept of purdah is to avoid temptation in society. But then he went on to explain how Pakistan's society works and this where he lost the plot.

"We don’t have discos here, we don’t have nightclubs, so it is a completely different society, way of life here, so if you raise temptation in society to the point and all these young guys have nowhere to go, it has consequences in the society."

The interviewer point-blank asked him if what women wear has any effect. This is where our premier really went off track.

"If a woman is wearing very few clothes it will have an impact, it will have an impact on the men, unless they’re robots. I mean it’s common sense."

Is it common sense, PM Imran? Do you think men are so weak and out of control that the slightest show of skin will send them into a violent sexual fit?

When questioned if women's clothes would really provoke acts of sexual violence, the premier instead of saying "No, rape is not provoked", he said: "It depends on which society you live in. If in a society where people haven’t seen that sort of thing, it will have an impact on them."

There you have it folks, our prime minister in all his glory.

If you still have doubts about whether the premier is a rape apologist, let us disabuse you of that notion.

A rape apologist is someone who excuses, condones or justifies rape. When PM Imran says women wearing "very few clothes" will have an impact on men, he's saying men will rape you if you don't wear the clothes they want you to. To our Oxford- educated prime minister, clothes "provoke" rape. What then were the children and animals who were raped in Pakistan wearing, we ask.

Clearly, he must have an answer for that.

Men are not robots, he said, as if any sane man would attack a woman based on her clothes. If you weren't insulted before, you should be now. Imran Khan seems to have little respect for rape victims and it seems he doesn't think much of men either. He believes that men can't help it: they'll see a woman in "very few clothes" and attack. That he sees Pakistani men as little more than animals with no impulse control speaks volumes.

And for the people who say, oh but he's talking about "very few clothes", let us ask you this: what constitutes "very few clothes"? Is it a bikini? Or jeans and a T-shirt? Or shalwar kameez without a dupatta? Or a hijab without an abaya? Or an abaya without a face covering?

We'll say it again and again and again: There is no justification for rape — not the victim's clothes, shoes, hair, style of walking, manner of talking or anything else.

He also needs to keep in mind that by pushing this problematic narrative of "young men" not having outlets for their sexual urges, he is giving rapists and harassers an excuse on a silver platter. And they are not all "young men"! As was recently proven by the Mufti Azizur Rehman sexual abuse case, rape is a crime perpetuated by anyone in a position of power.

If nothing else, the premier could have kept this harrowing case in his mind while answering questions about rape and temptation and reminded himself that though there is never a time to be a rape apologist, this is an even worse time than usual. The trauma of rape is immense and it resurges every time a rape apologist provides what in their mind constitutes as a reason for this violence.

To our prime minister we have a few heartfelt requests: 1) Think, really think, about the impact your words have on survivors of sexual assault and their families. You have reduced their pain to something as vague as temptation and don't seem to have any concrete answers as to how you plan to tackle this issue or give them justice 2) Talk to women, and really listen. Women are groped in societies which have "discos and nightclubs" and women who wear an abaya and a hijab and a veil have been subjected to sexual violence as well. Stop putting all the burden of sexual violence on women and how they dress.

If you don't know what the women of this society go through regardless of what they wear, and are going to group all men into the category of "unable to control their sexual urges", then you, Imran Khan, are not fit to represent this society that you speak of.

PAKISTAN

Twitter slams the government's decision to send the domestic violence bill to the CII

(Council of Islamic Ideology)

IMAGES STAFF


Users don't understand the objections to the bill and criticise the lack of women representation in the council.

Twitter is in an uproar after news broke that the government has sent the Domestic Violence Protection and Prevention Bill, 2021 to the Council of Islamic Ideology for review.

In a letter dated July 5, 2021, Babar Awan, the adviser to the prime minister on parliamentary affairs, pointed out that the bill, initially passed by the National Assembly in April, was referred back to the Lower House of Parliament after the Senate suggested amendments to the proposed law.

The letter states that concerns have been raised "regarding various definitions and other contents of the bill."

The bill defines domestic violence as "all acts of physical, emotional, psychological, sexual and economic abuse committed by a respondent against women, children, vulnerable persons, or any other person with whom the respondent is or has been in a domestic relationship that causes feat, physical or psychological harm to the aggrieved person". On Twitter, it has been praised for being wide-ranging and extensive.

The bill was initially moved by Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari on April 19 and is only going to apply to Islamabad. Sindh, KP and Punjab all have their own laws against domestic violence.

The news that the bill was being sent to the CII sent shockwaves across Twitter as people couldn't understand why.

Many took issue with the fact that there is no female representation on the CII, despite it being mandated by Article 228 of the Constitution.

There was little women representation throughout the process, except Mazari who put forward the bill.

Many people believed the bill was comprehensive enough to terrify men.

Others took on the notion that it was "against Pakistan's culture" and gave the internet a wakeup call.

Some believe the law may be weakened by any further amendments.

One Twitter user wanted to know what was so objectionable about the bill in the first place.

Actor Osman Khalid Butt was left nonplussed by the news.

Model Eman Suleman had a lot to say on the topic too.

“Okay let me clarify, imagine a country that hates its women so much that a bill to protect them from violence needs to be proposed only to be rejected,” she wrote on her Instagram Story with the hashtag #LoveMyCountry.

“Let this be a reminder to us that laws are made by men to protect men and to help them maintain their power over women/gender minorities. Our country literally refused to pass a bill to keep women and children safe from physical violence," she wrote in a second story.

"So the next time you put your faith in [the] law, think twice. And shut up with your innocent until proven guilty. Powerful men will get away with pretty much anything because the law is on their side. I am especially talking to other women.”

Actor and author Mira Sethi believed the government does not prioritise protecting women.

What do you think about the bill and its criticism?

Govt recommends referring domestic violence bill to Council of Islamic Ideology

Dawn.com

  Published July 6, 2021 - Updated

The Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Bill, 2021 was initially moved

in the NA by Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari  on April 19, 2021. — AP/File

Adviser to the Prime Minister on Parliamentary Affairs Babar Awan has written a letter to National Assembly Speaker Asad Qaiser, seeking a review of the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Bill, 2021, by the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) — a constitutional body that advises the legislature on whether or not a certain law is repugnant to the injunctions of Islam.

In the letter dated July 5, 2021, Awan has pointed out that the bill, initially passed by the National Assembly (NA) in April this year, was referred back to the Lower House of Parliament after the Senate suggested amendments to the proposed law.

The letter further states that concerns have been raised "regarding various definitions and other contents of the bill."

It adds: "Most importantly it is being highlighted that the bill contravenes the Islamic [injunctions] and way of life as enshrined in responsibility of the state in Article 31 of the Constitution of Islamic Republic of Pakistan".

Citing Article 230 (1) (b) of the Constitution, the letter says it "empowers the Islamic Council (CII) to advise a House, a Provincial Assembly, a President or a Governor on any question referred to it as to whether proposed law is or is not repugnant to the [injunctions] of Islam".

Moreover, under Article 230 (1) (a), the body can make recommendations to parliament regarding ways and means to encourage Muslims in Pakistan to lead their lives, individually and collectively, in accordance with the principles of Islam, Awan has stated in the letter.

On these grounds, he wrote, it is advisable that the bill be referred to the CII.

Passage of the bill

The Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Bill, 2021, was initially moved in the NA by Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari on April 19, 2021, and was passed by the Lower House the same day.

Through this act, a legal and institutional framework had been proposed for the territorial jurisdiction of Islamabad to ensure that victims of domestic violence were provided legal protection and relief and the perpetrators of this offence were punished, Mazari had said.

The bill was then referred to the Senate, where the opposition had defeated the government by one vote to block the immediate passage of the proposed law, insisting that the bill be referred to the relevant standing committee for further deliberation.

View from the courtroom: KP domestic violence bill a diluted version of previous drafts

At the time, PPP's Yousuf Raza Gilani, the leader of opposition in the Senate, had argued that while the bill was an important legislation that had taken months to be cleared from the NA, it needed to be referred to the standing committee.

A voice vote was then suggested to decide on the matter and when the opposition had defeated the government by 35-34, the Senate chairperson had directed the then yet-to-be-formed committee to present its report to the House on the matter two days after its formation.

Senate committee report

The Senate Committee on Human Rights had later submitted the report on June 18, mentioning that the bill aimed to "establish an effective system for the protection, relief and rehabilitation of women, children, elders and other vulnerable persons against domestic violence in the territorial jurisdiction of Islamabad Capital Territory".

According to the report, the law will empower courts to grant interim orders, protection custody and residence orders and award monetary relief to victims at the expense of respondents, and lead to the establishment of a protection committee to assist aggrieved persons and process their applications in court.

The report, however, had proposed multiple amendments to the draft as well, following which the bill was again referred to the NA.

'Disappearing into a black hole'

Last month, the opposition in the Senate had raised alarm over the bill, along with other key human rights legislations it had sponsored, disappearing into a black hole to emerge in the form of government bills.

“A wrong practice is going on for quite some time which is a disincentive for members of the Senate who work hard on the bills with the civil society and their colleagues,” PPP parliamentary leader Senator Sherry Rehman had said while raising the issue in the house.

She had regretted that instead of using parliamentary committees for scrutinising and reviewing bills, countless progressive bills had just vanished from parliamentary agendas under the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) government.

“It is shocking how my Bill, ‘Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Bill, 2020’, has been silently omitted from the agenda," Rehman had added.

CII's earlier ruling on domestic violence

In 2016, the CII had proposed a bill that allowed a husband to "lightly" beat his wife "if needed" and prohibited mixing of the genders in schools, hospitals and offices.

That proposal had come under fire by rights activists.

Farzana Bari, human rights activist and academic at Quaid-i-Azam University, had termed the proposed bill unconstitutional.

“Allowing a husband to beat his wife, in any way, is against Pakistan’s Constitution and the international laws and treaties that Pakistan has signed and is bound by. This Council is a burden on the Pakistani taxpayer and bringing a bad name to Muslims throughout the world,” she had said, warning that the bill “will take Pakistan further into ignorance.”