Friday, August 07, 2009
By Tariq Butt

ISLAMABAD: A three-member committee comprising top legal wizards will decide whether or not the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) that extricated President Asif Zardari and others from several corruption and criminal cases be presented before parliament.

“The committee has been constituted on the instruction of President Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani,” Minister of State for Law and Justice Afzal Sindhu told The News. He said the committee would meet in a couple of days to come out with its decision shortly on how to deal with the NRO and other ordinances.

It comprises Afzal Sindhu, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Dr Babar Awan and Attorney General Latif Khosa. Apart from the NRO, it will also review all the 36 ordinances that got the dubious constitutional cover in the Nov 3, 2007 emergency but undone by the Supreme Court in its July 31 judgment.

While Sindhu said the committee was set up on Zardari’s directives, presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar told this correspondent the issue of the NRO had not so far been discussed at the president’s level.

However, there have been widespread reports, attributed to official sources, that Gilani discussed implications of the apex court decision with Zardari for a number of times since July 31.

“It is for the government to decide the course to be adopted on the issue of the NRO,” Babar said, adding: “There are three options before the government ñ rejection or approval of the NRO through parliament or amending it.”

Khosa told The News that the NRO had become infructuous. He said it was his consistent view that the transactions took place under the NRO were past and closed, and that the NRO stood repealed after it lapsed.

There is no point, the attorney-general said, in pushing the NRO for parliament’s approval. Khosa said one view was that the NRO should be laid before parliament in compliance with the Supreme Court judgment.

He said the review boards had been formed under the NRO which, after scrutiny, sent cases to the courts concerned. After that, the courts acquitted persons involved in different cases specified in the NRO.

The NRO had amended Section 494 of the Code of Criminal Procedure 1898, which provided that all criminal cases registered between Jan 1, 1986, and Oct 12, 1999, would be examined by the review boards formed at the federal and provincial levels.

The cases found to be false and politically motivated by the boards were recommended for withdrawal by the governments. The National Accountability Ordinance (NAB) 1999 was also amended and all NAB cases initiated prior to Oct 12, 1999 — inside and outside Pakistan — were withdrawn and terminated.