A/HRC/13/42* page 97 Masood Janjua, and the mother of Faisal Farz, Zainab Khatoon, founded the organization Defence of Human Rights373 and filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking information about 16 people that the organization believed had been subjected to enforced disappearance. By July 2008, the organization represented 563 people who had disappeared.374 Special procedures have sent communications on a number of cases of alleged secret detention.375 189. In a report published in February 2009, the Eminent Jurists Panel on Terrorism, Counter-terrorism and Human Rights reported that at a hearing in Pakistan: Repeated reference was made to torture, prolonged arbitrary and incommunicado detention and disappearances allegedly committed by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The Panel heard directly from family members of disappeared people, and the trauma that they are living through was all too apparent. It was claimed that persons are held in unacknowledged or secret detention, that individuals have been rendered to other States (often for financial gain), and that individuals have been interrogated by foreign intelligence personnel while in incommunicado detention. The Panel heard that the ISI is operating to a large extent beyond either civilian or judicial control.376 190. The authorities’ resistance to investigations into those held in secret detention reached a low point on 3 November 2007, when President Musharraf suspended the Constitution, imposed a state of emergency, dismissed the entire Supreme Court and imprisoned the judges in their homes along with their families, although there was some improvement in 2008. In May, after the Minister for Law and Justice Farooq Naik promised that the Government would trace all of the people subjected to enforced disappearance, two committees were established for that purpose. In June, the Government declared that 43 disappeared people had been traced in Balochistan, and had either been released or were being held in official detention sites, even though, according to the Government’s own figures, 1,102 people had disappeared in Balochistan province alone.377 191. Following the election of Asif Ali Zardari as President on 6 September 2008, on 21 November, the Minister for Human Rights Mumtaz Alam Gilani announced that a new law was being prepared to facilitate the recovery of disappeared people. He stated that his ministry had 373 See the organization’s website at www.dhrpk.org. 374 Amnesty International, “Pakistan: denying the undeniable: enforced disappearances in Pakistan”, 23 July 2008. Available from www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/ASA33/018/2008/en. 375 A/HRC/10/44/Add.4, para. 168. 376 “Assessing damage: urging action: report of the Eminent Jurists Panel on Terrorism, Counter-terrorism and Human Rights”, February 2009. Available from http://icj.org/IMG/EJPreport.pdf, p.76. 377 Amnesty International report on Pakistan, 2009. Available from http://thereport.amnesty.org/en/regions/asia-pacific/pakistan.

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