Detained politician remanded to judicial custody

A senior opposition politician, arrested on a treason charge in late October, has been remanded to judicial custody after being detained for over two weeks by police, according to the chairman of an opposition alliance campaigning for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan. Makhdoom Javed Hashmi, a member of parliament and the president of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD), a coalition of opposition parties demanding Pakistan’s return to "true" democracy, was picked up in a late-night raid outside his official residence in the capital, Islamabad, on 28 October. His daughter, Memoona Hashmi, herself a parliamentarian, later told the Associated Press that Hashmi had been "dragged, beaten and thrown in a vehicle like a criminal". Hashmi was accused of defaming the army by distributing copies of a letter he claimed to have received in which members of the armed forces supposedly criticised President Pervez Musharraf’s role in the US-led war on terror. "The document in question was not signed by anybody, so how can you pick up someone on those grounds? This is not justice: this is a military action. It is dictatorial," Makhdoom Amin Fahim, the ARD’s chairman, told IRIN in Islamabad on Thursday. "The first thing is: he was illegally arrested. There were no solid reasons for his arrest, so why was an important member of the opposition arrested just like that?" he asked. On Thursday, Dawn, a leading English-language broadsheet, quoting sources, reported that Makhdoom Hashmi had been sent to the local central prison on a 14-day judicial remand by a lower-court judge, a day before his two-week detention by the police was to end. The politician told the judge he had been "subjected to severe mental and physical torture", the newspaper said. "Hashmi’s alleged torture is again something unconstitutional and a clear human-rights violation," Fahim stressed. "He should be released immediately. This is our demand," he said. Immediately after Hashmi’s arrest, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan issued a statement condemning the move and describing his detention "and the levelling of an extraordinary set of charges against him" as evidence of a stepped-up campaign to crush political dissent and create an environment of terror. Hashmi’s detention, the statement said, "falls in line with the increasingly obvious official policy of harassing opposition politicians, political activists and other dissidents". Meanwhile, an eminent lawyer and constitutional expert told IRIN in Islamabad that he believed there was no further legal justification for keeping Hashmi under detention once the 14-day police investigation had been completed. "As a lawyer, what I see is that the authorities have already completed their investigation, and therefore there is little justification for keeping him in custody," Abid Hassan Minto, a former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, said. "After all, he is an elected member of the National Assembly and a political leader of some consequence. He should be released," he added.