YET another case of alleged enforced disappearance has demonstrated the impunity granted to certain forces in the country, which consider themselves above the law in an increasingly repressive dispensation. Ahmad Farhad Shah, a Kashmiri journalist and poet, was reportedly picked up from his home in Islamabad a couple of weeks ago and has been missing since then.

He is the latest addition to a long list of missing persons, which highlights the state’s worsening human rights record and increasingly repressive nature. Over the years, the country has seen intelligence agencies orchestrate the abductions of dissidents. There has been a marked uptick in such cases over the past few years, with the hybrid administration becoming increasingly coercive.

There has been intriguing inaction from the administration over the fate of the young poet who dared to question the establishment. He was taken away after the recent violent protests in Azad Kashmir that caused fatalities. He had reportedly been facing harassment from the intelligence agencies for his political views.

The case of the missing poet has drawn wider traction after the Islamabad High Court summoned the officials of the ISI, MI, IB, the federal law minister and the secretaries for interior, defence and law to appear for the next hearing. Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani, the senior puisne judge of the IHC, also ordered the live-streaming of all cases pertaining to missing persons to “facilitate public awareness and understanding of important legal issues”.

It has certainly been a bold decision by an increasingly assertive superior judiciary, which has been defying pressure from the intelligence agencies. The court........

© Dawn