Pakistan claims 'sharp decline' in missing persons following judicial, media scrutiny-India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

The chairman of Pakistan's National Assembly's Standing Committee on Human Rights has informed a UN mission that incidents of enforced disappearances had declined sharply since the issue became the focus of the judiciary, parliament and media. Riaz Fatiana, who met with the two-member UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, said he had informed the mission that most of the cases of the missing persons had been lingering on since the time General Pervez Musharraf was in power, reports The Dawn. He said there had been no mechanism available with the judiciary and parliament to trace the missing persons, except for depending on law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. Fatiana said the number of missing persons had come down to less than 400 from the previously reported 2,300. He said the situation was not as bad as being portrayed by the media and that such incidents had mostly been reported in the provinces of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in FATA. He told the UN officials that all the state institutions were playing a positive role to resolve the issue. The UN working group, headed by its Chair-Rapporteur Olivier de Frouville, is on a 10-day visit to Pakistan on the invitation of the government. The group members have visited Balochistan and met nationalist leaders and relatives of the missing persons.