Closing avenues
Although the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) satisfied with its performance which has kept Pakistan off the US list of countries failing to fight human trafficking for the last two years, the governments of Greece, Turkey, Iran and Oman still want Islamabad to ‘do more’ to control human smuggling into their countries.
In spite of the FIA’s avowed focus on overland human smuggling, a large number of Pakistanis still manage to enter these countries every year. These countries are worried over the situation and have asked Pakistan to ‘do the needful’ to address the problem. But since the FIA is utilizing its energies more on investigating terrorism incidents and measures to check the rising trend, it seems human trafficking has taken a back seat on its priority list.
According to the FIA Punjab, around 2,700 Pakistanis were deported---mostly from Turkey and Iran in 2010, while several thousands are reportedly languishing in prisons abroad and at home. Among the deportees are teenagers as well, proving that the local agent mafia does not hesitate to lure even minors. In such cases, the FIA holds the parents responsible, saying that unless they (parents/guardians) do not wish to send their children abroad for a ‘bright future’ the children cannot arrange the amount on their own to pay the agents for this purpose.
The FIA Punjab Additional Director Main Raiz Ahmed tells that owing to a successful operation against agents and sub-agents in Gujranwala division, where a huge number of youngsters attempt to reach greener pastures by paying thousands of rupees to agents human smuggling has been substantially controlled.
He says that during 2010, the FIA Punjab had arrested 1,371 agents and sub-agents involved in human smuggling.”We have also nabbed 19’most wanted’ human smugglers involved in a number of cases registered against them by the FIA,” he says, adding that arresting such a big number of most wanted smugglers means breaking the ‘backbone’ of the network. Besides these people, he says that the agency had also arrested 624 proclaimed offenders last year.
Ahmed further reveals that last year over 2,000 cases were registered against the agent mafia and over 3,000 inquiries were finalized in this regard. “Our conviction rate has also improved as a total of 1,565 agents were convicted in 2010,” he concludes.
Last year, the FIA Lahore also off-loaded some 100 passengers trying to leave the country on forged documents. “Human trafficking by air has come to an end because of the strict measures adopted by the agency,’ says the FIA spokesman.
White-collar job-seekers need laws to protect them
Recently the government has passed an ordinance, the Industrial Relations ordinance (IRO) 2011, and has rightly earned kudos from the labor force of the country. This ordinance has been passed to fill some void created for the employees/working class coming under the federal government after labor issues were transferred to the provinces according to requirements of the 18th Amendment. However, rights, difficulties, predicaments, no-job injustices and sufferings faced by so-called white-collar job-holders and officers, whose numbers run into thousands, are not addressed. There is no proper and specific law to define and control their relationship with the employers or managements. There is no mechanism for them to resolve their job-related disputes. These people can, of course, form associations of their own, but these serve no real purpose.
Except for civil servants and unionized labor forces, all others are governed by an ‘unlegislated’, unspecified and ‘undocumented’ piece of rule called ‘master and servant rule’, which in various high court and Supreme Court decisions have been declared as against natural justice and against Islamic tenets (for example, 2000 PLC (C.S.) 796 and PLD 1990 Supreme Court 28 etc.).
Hundreds of petitions by employees are thrown by judges of various high courts, citing this dreadful ‘master ad servant rules.’
It may, however, be interesting to note that, the original ‘master and servant act’, when first enacted in England in 1867, gave the right of forming union to employees and workers. Under these act higher status workers, such as professionals, managers, clerks and agents, were never subject to the concept of master-servant relationship. In Pakistan, this rule is still used with impunity. For some time a vast majority of such unprotected bread-winners got some protection, thanks to the amended insertion of Section 2A in the Federal Service Tribunal Act 1973. But after Section 2A was declared ultra vires by the Supreme Court in January 2006, the fate of this category of employees got darkened forever.
It is said that, due to the striking down of Section 2A in the FST Act 1973, the fate of thousands of employees of such government-owned organizations had been very badly affected. But nobody from the government, or from among legislators, or the legal or the judges fraternity came out to give these people some forum to bask in the shine and warmth of the law. The government and all others must make laws for white-collar job-seekers.
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