PAKISTAN: Frontier Crimes Regulation -- Infringing Human and Child Rights
By Abdullah Khoso

Introduction

During the time of the British Raj in the subcontinent of India, a set of civil and criminal laws, rules, and regulations were established ostensibly to maintain law and order in the land, but essentially to ensure that the people of British India remained in the total control of the government. However, in the mountainous areas of the North West Frontier, the region known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Provincially Administered Tribal Areas, now a part of Pakistan, a special set of rules and regulations were devised that effectively placed the people of the region under the dictatorial rule of the Political Agent, and his cohorts -- the khans and maliks (tribal leaders or chieftains) -- who chose to support the British in their endeavour to subjugate the unruly yet fiercely independent tribes of the Frontier.

After Independence, and the birth of a sovereign Pakistan, it was hoped that the Constitution of 1973 would herald a new era of freedom for the people of this country to flourish and progress. However, unlike the rest of Pakistan, the Constitution was not applied to the region of FATA, whose people continued, and still continue, to suffer the indignities and cruelties of the archaic British laws under the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), established in 1901 in their present form.
Eventually, a ray of hope shone brightly for the people of FATA when, on 29 March 2008, the Prime Minister of Pakistan Makhdoom Yousuf Raza Gilani, in his first speech to the National Assembly of Pakistan, vowed to repeal the FCR which he termed ‘the Black and Obsolete Law of the 20th Century’1. Following the prime minister’s March announcement, on 14 August 2009, the President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari, also declared that the draconian laws of the FCR will be abolished or amended.2 Since these announcements, a committee has been constituted to look into the matter and make recommendations.
There is a need to support the complete abolition and repeal of the FCR, so that FATA may be brought under the purview of the Constitution of Pakistan, 1973 in the same manner that the rest of Pakistan enjoys. The FCR is a direct contravention of the Constitution of Pakistan, 1973, as well as the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance (JJSO), 2000, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 1948, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1966, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), 1989.
This position paper reviews the status of the FCR, in the light of human and child rights organizations’ recommendation that the FCR should be repealed forthwith, since the present government announced in 2008 and 2009 that it will either be repealed or amended. It also highlights the contradictions between the FCR with child rights and human rights, and especially how the FCR are a direct contravention of the Constitution of Pakistan, the JJSO, UDHR, and CRC.

Overview

FATA comprises seven independent tribal agencies and six smaller frontier regions