S.M. Zafar—An Effective Legal Advocate for Human Rights

by Richard H. Curtiss

S.M. Zafar , executive director of the Human Rights Society of Pakistan, started his career as a lawyer in the 1950s. Aware that such giants of Pakistan and India’s independence movement as Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas K. Gandhi had been lawyers, Zafar and fellow young members of the Lahore bar association, Pakistan’s largest, readily took up political issues in the first years after the creation of Pakistan.

They played an important role during the 1958 imposition of martial law in Pakistan and again in forcing amendments to Pakistan’s 1962 constitution, which at first did not have sufficient protections for basic human rights.

After serving as a judge of the high court and as Pakistan’s minister for law and parliamentary affairs, Mr. Zafar retired from the government in 1968 and started his own law practice. In 1976 he and a journalist, a woman activist, a businessman, and two colleagues from the legal profession founded the Human Rights Society of Pakistan.

Mr. Zafar, who also was at one time the secretary-general of the Pakistan Muslim League and at another time the chief organizer of another political party, the National People’s Party, has served as the Human Rights Society’s elected chairman ever since.

In this capacity and as an attorney, Mr. Zafar says, he has been involved in “most of the important cases in which political activists, journalists and others were arrested and detained.”

Describing the role of his organization, Mr. Zafar explains: “Human rights activists find a lack of awareness of their rights among the people of Pakistan. They are only aware of the human rights that touch their political rights, but not their other rights under the law.”

There also is a problem of enforcing human rights, he continues. “The courts take a very long time in dealing with issues, and there used to be an attitude of ‘who are you?’ to bring such cases,” he says. “Now awareness has increased in the urban areas and the courts have improved as well. Many judges are judicial activists, and they give precedence to human rights cases.”

Mr. Zafar, who also is chairman of the Cultural Association of Pakistan, points out that more NGOs are functioning, and “now there are three or four good organizations in their field.” His own organization gives awards annually to persons who have shown dedication to the field of human rights. Recipients have included judges, writers, social workers and politicians.

The Human Rights Society also conducts seminars and workshops for journalists and for its own workers and activists and those of other human rights organizations.

“The worst human rights problems in Pakistan are the result of a society that still is divided into feudal and non-feudal strata,” Mr. Zafar explains. “There are large areas where feudalists are living today with the same authority as in the seventh and eighth centuries in Europe. The tribal chief is still paramount and we have not been able to weaken that feudal mentality. These feudal leaders and landlords have no human rights awareness. Sometimes they flout the law. The malady is too vast and the remedy is too limited.”

As for Pakistani society as a whole, Mr. Zafar says it is “a pluralist society, but there is no democracy within the parties. It is a personality cult. Human rights, therefore, are a clear challenge to the culture.”

“The greatest problem for human rights workers, however, goes back to the period of British rule,” Mr. Zafar says. “The British left a legacy of a corrupt police and we, instead of improving the situation, have perpetuated it. Politicians make use of police officers.

“In Karachi, people have been killed in police encounters, yet there have been no trials. Instead witnesses fail to come to court. Proceedings are too drawn out. Confrontational politics in Pakistan have taken a heavy toll on human rights. The influence of the illiterate mullahs is yet another hindrance on the development of human rights.”

Zafar is less pessimistic, however, about the future of human rights in Pakistan. “My hope is in glasnost,” he explains. “That has occurred because the Pakistani press is free, despite the fact that all martial law administrators have tried to curb the press.”

He notes that even the manipulation of government advertising to punish editors who criticize government actions has not been able to curb freedom of the press. “There is a strength in the culture of Pakistan that has brought about freedom of the press,” he maintains. “If the government withholds advertising from a newspaper, it is likely to get more advertising from the private sector.

“Further, we can convey the most difficult things by innuendo. There is a capacity among the writers and also a capacity among the recipients to read the innuendo. This is even more true in the Urdu-language press than in the English-language press. It is easier to write between the lines in Urdu. The writer can convey things subtly not only to the readers, but to the rulers. This freedom is good and it has produced a lot of truth.”

As an example, Zafar cites the public support that encouraged a landmark decision by a Pakistani supreme court judge on March 20, 1996, to stop the executive branch of the government from packing the court—giving its own supporters the judgeships. “Thus the independence of the judiciary will increase,” Zafar said approvingly.

Zafar criticizes his country’s NGOs for not doing more work in the rural areas. He cites illiteracy as one of the barriers to the realization of human rights. On the other hand, he notes, Pakistanis are generally religious people, and their emphasis is on ethics, not on creeds. The people of Pakistan, he says, were not converted to Islam by the mullahs, but by Sufi missionaries who were humanitarians, not doctrinarians.

“Pakistanis are motivated by a love for humanity and by the love of the Sufis,” according to Mr. Zafar. “They are an ethically religious people who are hospitable and very generous.”

Mr. Zafar has put his observations on his people, their history and society, and their legal system into a number of books. Among those he has written are one describing nine of the most important legal cases in which he has been involved, one on The People, the Parliament and Islam, dealing with the years of military government under Gen. Zia ul-Haq, another analyzing a number of legal opinions, and still another for lawyers on the interpretation of statutes. In preparation are a book in Urdu on the superior courts of Pakistan and a book in English on the crisis period that marked the end of the Ayub Khan regime early in modern Pakistan’s history. Still another book he has written in English is on the Muslim pilgrimage, entitled The Haj: A Journey in Obedience.

For a foreign visitor, an hour spent with S.M. Zafar provides an enlightening in-depth examination of the two major problems, corruption and feudalism, that still bedevil his country. It also provides a reassuring review of the inherent strengths in Pakistan’s culture and religiosity, and also its extraordinary devotion to a free press, all of which point the way toward solutions of those same two problems.

Perhaps most reassuring of all is Mr. Zafar himself. He clearly is a busy attorney, whose waiting room, at the end of a one-hour interview in his office, was full of clients and associates seeking a word with him. Yet as he systematically reviewed his country’s situation 49 years after its creation, he revealed the manner in which he has put his own extraordinarily broad and humane interests at the service of his people.

Equally heartening was his final gesture. Instead of showing his visitor to the elevator, as is the hospitable Pakistani custom, he conducted the writer to another crowded and extremely busy office in the same building.

It was the headquarters of another NGO, in the field of women’s rights. Its executive director is his American-educated economist daughter, Roushane Zafar. Clearly as the successor generation takes over in Pakistan, it will do its best to ensure that none of the human rights achievements of the country’s founding fathers are lost in the transition.