Wisal Yousafzai
PESHAWAR: When her husband sent her out to demand land from her brother and father, Shagufta, 25, thought it was the end of the world.
Without getting her share in the land from her father, her husband would not let her stay with him.She left her home with two children and moved to her father’s house in Mingora Swat.
Shagufta’s father reached out to the Dispute Resolution Council in the police station in Rahimabad Mingora to help resolve the matter.
DRCs are Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) platforms first established as a pilot project in police stations in KP in 2014. Since then they have become operational in all districts of the province with members drawn from the community, usually elders enjoying people’s trust, who resolve conflicts through mediation between parties to a conflict.
According to KP police website, the aim of the DRCs establishment is to create engagement between offenders, victim and the community to have reconciliation on community disputes.
Every DRC has its own territorial jurisdiction with 21 members each of which members are notified by the local police usually elders, well respected and bearing good repute. DRCs are based within police stations, either police refers cases to DRC or an applicant comes to SHO requesting to refer his case to DRC. The DRC Chairman constitutes a panel of 3 members and fix a dates for hearing, the second party is invited through police, after listening to both parties, the DRC members present options for resolving the conflict, which is drafted as a contract / agreement when both parties agree to it.
The number of women representing in DRCs in quite low. The Rahimabad DRC in Swat has only a single woman as its member out of 21. Members of the DRC and people of the area told that it is due to the cultural issues that women were not encouraged to participate.
Data from the model police station in Rahimabad area of Swat – one of the KP districts where the United Nation Development Program (UNDP) has helped establish DRCs and trained members in mediation, basic law and human rights – shows that it had dealt with over 3000 disputes since 2014. Of these 2500 cases have been settled through mediation while the rest of the cases have either been referred to court, or the parties didn’t agree to reconcile.
“Most of the cases referred to the DRC in Rahimabad relate to domestic disputes, inheritance, land grabbing and demarcation,” said Sher Zaman, a member of the Rahim Abad DRC.
The World Justice Project rule of law index is the world’s leading source for original data on the rule of law and how it is experienced and perceived by the general public in a country. In its 2016 report for Pakistan, the WJP’s index – that covers 113 countries – says: “Pakistan’s overall rule of law performance places it at 5 out of 6 countries in the South Asia region (with Nepal at the top and Afghanistan at the bottom), and 25 out of 28 among lower-middle income countries, and 106 out of the overall 113 countries and jurisdictions worldwide.”
While in a developing democracy like Pakistan, the country has been struggling since its inception to realize the rule of law through periodic reforms aimed at ending impunity, ensuring government accountability, ensuring fundamental rights, order and security and civil and criminal justice, access to these remain far from fair and effective for communities still, whose perception of the rule of law as experienced in everyday situations remain negative and critical.
The rule of law environment has been further vitiated by terrorism and general breakdown of law and order in its wake since 2001.
While the government and the security apparatus has been distracted to address the ever-rising threat and incidents of terror across the country, the understaffed and underequipped police and the justice system has been increasingly drawn into dealing with terrorism, saddled with cases of terrorism and distracted from their routine role of ensuring civil and criminal justice.
While the need for community policing and alternative dispute resolution cannot be overestimated in Pakistan where the rule of law is far from effective, it is in times of conflict that these initiatives acquire an certain urgency – to provide relief and support to the justice system while enabling communities, including women for whom access to justice remains elusive, to proactively engage in ensuring law and order at the local level.
In the conservative KP, women affected by domestic and other disputes are reluctant to go to police stations for reasons of purdah. “Women think of police stations as places managed by men,” said says Zeenat Gul, 32, a woman councilor in local government and a member of Police Laison Committee. “They think of them as places meant to deal with criminals.”
However in contrast to the conventional justice system, DRCs don’t insist that all parties to a dispute must appear before them. If someone is reluctant or there is a women who don’t want to come, DRC members themselves go to her. To a question that how DRCs take charge of a particular case, DRC members told that cases were referred to them by the police and sometime courts as well.
In some cases, a person himself/herself requests the police to get their cases resolved through the DRC. “The DRC then calls both the parties to negotiating table and try to solve the problem if both parties agree,” said Sher Zaman. “DRCs are just there to mediate but if one of the respondents insists to get a solution of the problem through a court of law, we don’t press them anymore. Normally 99% cases were amicably resolved through DRCs which itself a great success.”
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has established 73 Model Police Station across the province, with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
