Federal Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar stated on Friday that the government has offered a package worth Rs. 5 million for each family as part of its efforts to offer financial and legal support to the heirs of missing individuals.
Earlier today in Islamabad, the minister gave a briefing to the media about the decisions made during the federal cabinet meeting presided over by Prime Minister Shehbaz.
The premier accepted the package in light of the suggestions made by the previous committees on the problem of missing individuals, according to Tarar, who also stated that the federal cabinet reviewed the missing persons issue and approved the support package.
The law minister said that the cabinet was provided with two reports about the missing individuals today. After considering the committees’ final findings, the cabinet decided to establish a special committee to look into actual cases of families in need of assistance.
He went on to say that the new committee will deal with the issues that the relatives of the missing people are facing.
He underlined that the aid being offered today is not a payment, saying instead that it is an effort by the government to ease the families’ sorrow and find solutions to their issues.
The law minister stated that the issue of missing individuals has many “complicated” causes. The majority of the cases have been handled by the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (COIED), and the government has taken stringent action to address the problem.
Tarar continued, “The government is committed to using all available resources to resolve all issues pertaining to missing persons.”
Last month, the minister of law asserted that “only 23 percent of cases involving missing persons are pending,” noting that 10,200 cases total—of which only 8,000 had been addressed—were reported to the COIED.
According to the ministry of information, the Supreme Court established an investigation panel in 2011 to look into missing individuals. Of the 10,023 cases, the commission resolved 7,900 of them, leaving 23% of the cases ongoing.
The missing people investigation panel stated in its report, which was released in January of this year, that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has the greatest number of reported missing individuals (3,485) in the nation. The disappearances were mostly caused by causalities in drone operations and the upsurge in militancy, according to the study.
