PESHAWAR: The newly established Child Protection Court in Mohmand tribal district has received encouraging response from the community, a senior lawyer told Arab News on Wednesday, adding that three cases were filed only a day after its inauguration on August 8.
“The people of the tribal areas remained deprived of a proper judicial system for decades,” Raza Khan Sufi, general secretary of the Mohmand Bar Association, said while making a reference to the colonial-era laws that were used in the tribal territories until their recent mainstreaming by the Pakistani authorities. “Little attention was also paid to protect children from violence and abuse. It is important to set up similar courts in other tribal districts as well.”
Mohmand’s Child Protection Court was established in the beginning of this month following the provincial cabinet’s approval last year to provide speedy justice under the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Child Protection and Welfare Act, 2010, and Juvenile Justice System Act, 2018.
Zubair Hussain, a protocol officer at the Peshawar High Court (PHC), said similar legal infrastructure would soon be set up in other tribal districts as well.
“Three criminal cases involving children were brought to the court on the next day of its inauguration,” President Mohmand Bar Association Gul Rehman said, adding that the facility would ensure the welfare of children while dealing with issues like legal custody of neglected and destitute children.
Habib-ur-Rehman, a tribal elder, told Arab News that one of his close neighbors, Jan Saeed, was imprisoned for kidnapping and selling his (Rehman’s) three-year-old nephew.
“He confessed to the crime and said that he had sold my nephew for Rs 250,000. However, we could not find him anywhere. My case will now be taken up by the Child Protection Court, hopefully on a priority basis,” he said.
Huma Khan, monitoring and evaluation coordinator at the Acid Survivors Foundation, told Arab News that the establishment of the court would reduce overcrowding in prison and avoid secondary victimization of children during investigation, trial, and post-trial phases.
“It is likely to contribute to improved rule of law and increased public trust in the judicial and state institutions, fostering greater sense of security, social cohesion and better governance,” she added.
During the inauguration of the court, PHC Registrar Khawaja Wajihuddin told the media that similar courts had already been established in Peshawar, Mardan and Abbottabad.
The three courts, he added, had disposed of 1,140 cases since becoming functional.
“The Child Protection Court can minimize the scale of crime against children if speedy justice is delivered,” said the general secretary of the Mohmand Bar Association. “The facility has a good environment which will not be too burdensome for children.”
Mohmand's new child protection court begins to receive cases
https://arab.news/jz5mq
Mohmand's new child protection court begins to receive cases
- The country’s tribal areas did not have a proper judicial system until recently and were governed under colonial-era laws
- Experts say the new court will help avoid secondary victimization of children during investigation, trial, and post-trial phases
Pakistani man convicted in US in political assassination plot tied to Iranian paramilitary
- Asif Merchant, 47, worked for Pakistani banks for decades before going into clothing and other businesses
- He testified he met a Revolutionary Guard operative who gave him countersurveillance training, assignments
NEW YORK: A Pakistani business owner who tried to hire hit men to kill a US politician was convicted Friday in a trial that showcased allegations of Iran-backed plotting on American soil.
As the Iran war unfolded in the Mideast, Asif Merchant acknowledged in a US court that he sought to put an assassination in motion during the 2024 presidential campaign — a plot that was quickly disrupted by American investigators before it had a chance to proceed.
A jury in Brooklyn convicted Merchant on terrorism and murder for hire charges.
The verdict after only a couple hours of deliberations followed a weeklong trial that included remarkable testimony from Merchant himself.
Merchant told the jury he was carrying out instructions from a contact in the Islamic Republic’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. According to Merchant, the handler never specified a target but broached names including then-candidate Donald Trump, then-President Joe Biden and Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador who was also in the race for a time.
The Iranian government has denied trying to kill US officials.
The nascent plot fell apart after Merchant showed an acquaintance what he had in mind by using objects on a napkin to depict a shooting at a rally. He asked the man to help him hire assassins. Instead, he was introduced to undercover FBI agents who were secretly recording him, as had the acquaintance.
Merchant told the supposed hit men he needed services that could include killing “some political person” and paid them $5,000 in cash in a parked car in Manhattan.
“This man landed on American soil hoping to kill President Trump — instead, he was met with the might of American law enforcement,” US Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement released after the conviction.
Merchant’s attorney, Avraham Moskowitz, didn’t immediately reply to a message seeking comment.
Merchant, 47, worked for Pakistani banks for decades before going into clothing and other businesses. He has two families, in Pakistan and Iran, and he sometimes visited the US for his garment business.
Merchant testified that he met a Revolutionary Guard intelligence operative about three years ago. The contact gave him countersurveillance training and assignments including the assassination scheme, Merchant said.
He maintained that he had to do his handler’s bidding to protect loved ones in Iran. The defendant said he reluctantly went through the motions but thought he’d be arrested and explain his situation to authorities before anyone was killed.
“I was going along with it,” he said, speaking in Urdu through a court interpreter.
Prosecutors emphasized that Merchant admitted taking steps to enact the plan on behalf of the Revolutionary Guard, which the US considers a foreign terrorist organization, and he didn’t proactively go to authorities.
Instead, he was packing for a flight to Pakistan when he was arrested on July 12, 2024, a day before an unrelated attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania. Officials said it appeared the Butler gunman acted alone but that they had been tracking a threat on Trump’s life from Iran, a claim that the Islamic Republic called “unsubstantiated and malicious.”
When Merchant subsequently spoke to FBI agents to explore the possibility of a cooperation agreement, he didn’t say he had acted out of fear for his family.
Prosecutors argued that he didn’t back up a defense of acting under duress. Merchant sought to persuade jurors he simply didn’t think the agents would believe him because they seemed to “think that I am some type of super-spy,” which he said he was “absolutely not.”
