Professor Muhammad Ismail, human rights activist and his wife Mrs. Uzlifat Ismail were acquitted by Peshawar anti-terrorism court in a case of terrorism, terror financing, sedition and conspiracy after a lengthy trial.
Tagging Pakistan’s foreign office and the permanent mission in Geneva, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders Mary Lawlor tweeted on Tuesday she will be “following closely” the verdict of human rights defender Professor Muhammad Ismail’s trial for a case on charges including sedition and terror financing, by a Peshawar court on February 15. The UN has previously declared that Professor Ismail was specifically targeted for his human rights work.
https://twitter.com/MaryLawlorhrds/status/1625423948988010497
A former political worker of the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP), a college lecturer, an NGO founder and father of a prominent human rights defender, Professor Muhammad Ismail has been forcibly disappeared, arbitrarily arrested, jailed, tried for terrorism, sedition, conspiracy and terror financing, his home repeatedly raided, separated from his children, put on a no-fly list and muzzled non-stop for his political dissent, outspoken defense of human rights, standing up to a military dictator and criticizing the religious right.
Since 1978, he has been targeted during two military dictatorships — Generals Zia and Musharraf— and Imran Khan’s administration. Ismail’s daughter, internationally recognized human rights activist, had started supporting the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, and spoke in public about the allegations of sexual harassment by the armed forces in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Since 2018, Gulalai Ismail was put on an Exit Control List, arbitrarily detained, targeted and named in police cases on fabricated cases. She was unable to return home after an anti-terrorism case was filed against her on May 22, 2019. “We watched a news story that arrest warrants for Gulalai had been issued, and advised her to not come home,” Prof. Ismail told me. She was declared absconder. Eventually after months of going under-ground she fled for asylum and reached the US.
For the powers that be, the hounding of the daughter was incomplete without going after her family. At the height of repression Pakistani civil society and media were slapped with, on May 24, 2019 security forces carried out their first raid on the residence of human rights defender Professor Muhammad Ismail, and father of women’s rights activist and member of the National Democratic Movement, Gulalai Ismail. For over three years, the Ismail family has been judicially persecuted and harassed mercilessly by the state apparatus including the Islamabad and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police, Counter-Terrorism Department, the Federal Investigation Agency, unidentified men in plain clothes i.e the intelligence operatives and the courts of Peshawar.
The May 24 raid was one of many, and a beginning of a relentless witch hunt against the Ismail family. Men in plain clothes, uniforms of Islamabad police including women officers, and an armed man in a shirt with anti-terrorist squad printed on the back, police mobile and other cars can be seen in those two videos. Afterwards the series of surveillance intensified. Two raids were conducted on the in-laws of Prof. Ismail’s elder son and one at his cousin’s home in Peshawar. Once the CCTV footage of the May 24 raid was shared on social media, and the Ismail family began speaking of the raids in public. The authorities confiscated equipment for CCTV, and then over the years at least three laptops and many cell phones. “Those who raided our Islamabad house never identified their professional affiliation, but police did accompany them. They took away cell phones and CCTV systems. They were [definitely] not from FIA. When CTD raided our home in Marghuz, they confiscated two laptops from our house. When I was abducted from the Gate of PHC, I had a laptop and mobile, FIA took away both from me, they returned the damaged laptop, but not the mobile phone,” explained Professor Ismail.
https://twitter.com/Rabail26/status/1132381633934315521
https://twitter.com/Rabail26/status/1132403082128572416
What followed in May 2019 was also a separation of the family. Their younger daughter was forced to flee and discontinue her studies in Pakistan. Now the family has been living between three countries, and the ailing couple is unable to reunite with their children. When Professor Ismail’s wife Mrs. Uzlifat went to get her passport renewed, the couple were told of their names having been placed on the Exit Control List in October 2019. Eventually she received a government notification. The harassment of the Ismail family has been systemic and carried out methodically. Professor Ismail was forcibly disappeared for a few hours when he filed a petition to quash this case in October 2019. He was presented before the court, given bail, then denied bail in November and detained for a month. The couple were named in the terror financing case with their daughter in 2020.
In 2021, Professor Ismail was arrested for two months. “I have tried to note down the number of my appearances in various courts. In the ATC-1 of Peshawar, I have appeared 167 times, and appeared in ATC-2 for dozens of times. I have also appeared for the petition of PECA FIR against me each month before the PHC, but every time I am told the case is leftover” shared the professor.
After an accident on the Motorway, on their way to Peshawar from Islamabad, the professor decided to move to his hometown Swabi in 2021. The accident appeared deliberate to the couple, and to mitigate risks they began taking public transport for months to the court. The physical surveillance of the Ismail family, according to them, only stopped after release from Professor Ismail’s second release in April. However, the toll of the judicial persecution on the family’s financial condition and health of the senior couple has been immense.
Professor Ismail was imprisoned for a month in Haripur for wall chalking against General Zia as a student in 1978, for month in the mid 80s as a DSF (Democratic Students Federation) activist, charged with insult to religion by Islamist politicians in KP, and in the early aughts for trumped up corruption charges against his NGO —a case which was closed eventually. But he states that the hybrid regime of 2018 onwards was unlike what he experienced before. “Imran Khan government was shameless, for they lied continuously during my case. In the ATC, a man was produced who said he was from Jaish-e-Muhammad and claimed I had given him funds. Another claimed he sold us, my wife and I, weapons, and one supposed rickshaw driver claimed we helped Afghan citizens buy weapons from Darra Adam Khel,” he told The Friday Times. Professor Ismail claims police placed false evidence of his purchase of the car which was used to carry out bombing of the Peshawar All Saints Church. His academic research into progressive Urdu literature from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 has been used against him during the trial.
The targeting of Professor Ismail and his family is emblematic of how the state has attacked its progressives, critics of the military establishment and defenders of human dignity, specifically those from ethnicities other than the majoritarian group. What it also establishes is the degree to which the judiciary has been complicit in shutting down the movement for human rights. As the on-going trial on trumped-up charges comes to an end for the professor and he awaits a final verdict, another sword to keep him in check hangs on his head. In January 2023, he was indicted in the pending case of PECA from 2019. The next hearing will be in March. He was sick with Covid when that case was put on hold by the Peshawar High Court.
“I consider myself a subject of the state of Pakistan, not its citizens with equal rights. The judiciary is so compromised it has refused to give me any relief for years,” said the Professor.
Tagging Pakistan’s foreign office and the permanent mission in Geneva, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders Mary Lawlor tweeted on Tuesday she will be “following closely” the verdict of human rights defender Professor Muhammad Ismail’s trial for a case on charges including sedition and terror financing, by a Peshawar court on February 15. The UN has previously declared that Professor Ismail was specifically targeted for his human rights work.
https://twitter.com/MaryLawlorhrds/status/1625423948988010497
A former political worker of the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP), a college lecturer, an NGO founder and father of a prominent human rights defender, Professor Muhammad Ismail has been forcibly disappeared, arbitrarily arrested, jailed, tried for terrorism, sedition, conspiracy and terror financing, his home repeatedly raided, separated from his children, put on a no-fly list and muzzled non-stop for his political dissent, outspoken defense of human rights, standing up to a military dictator and criticizing the religious right.
Since 1978, he has been targeted during two military dictatorships — Generals Zia and Musharraf— and Imran Khan’s administration. Ismail’s daughter, internationally recognized human rights activist, had started supporting the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, and spoke in public about the allegations of sexual harassment by the armed forces in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Since 2018, Gulalai Ismail was put on an Exit Control List, arbitrarily detained, targeted and named in police cases on fabricated cases. She was unable to return home after an anti-terrorism case was filed against her on May 22, 2019. “We watched a news story that arrest warrants for Gulalai had been issued, and advised her to not come home,” Prof. Ismail told me. She was declared absconder. Eventually after months of going under-ground she fled for asylum and reached the US.
For the powers that be, the hounding of the daughter was incomplete without going after her family. At the height of repression Pakistani civil society and media were slapped with, on May 24, 2019 security forces carried out their first raid on the residence of human rights defender Professor Muhammad Ismail, and father of women’s rights activist and member of the National Democratic Movement, Gulalai Ismail. For over three years, the Ismail family has been judicially persecuted and harassed mercilessly by the state apparatus including the Islamabad and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police, Counter-Terrorism Department, the Federal Investigation Agency, unidentified men in plain clothes i.e the intelligence operatives and the courts of Peshawar.
The May 24 raid was one of many, and a beginning of a relentless witch hunt against the Ismail family. Men in plain clothes, uniforms of Islamabad police including women officers, and an armed man in a shirt with anti-terrorist squad printed on the back, police mobile and other cars can be seen in those two videos. Afterwards the series of surveillance intensified. Two raids were conducted on the in-laws of Prof. Ismail’s elder son and one at his cousin’s home in Peshawar. Once the CCTV footage of the May 24 raid was shared on social media, and the Ismail family began speaking of the raids in public. The authorities confiscated equipment for CCTV, and then over the years at least three laptops and many cell phones. “Those who raided our Islamabad house never identified their professional affiliation, but police did accompany them. They took away cell phones and CCTV systems. They were [definitely] not from FIA. When CTD raided our home in Marghuz, they confiscated two laptops from our house. When I was abducted from the Gate of PHC, I had a laptop and mobile, FIA took away both from me, they returned the damaged laptop, but not the mobile phone,” explained Professor Ismail.
https://twitter.com/Rabail26/status/1132381633934315521
https://twitter.com/Rabail26/status/1132403082128572416
What followed in May 2019 was also a separation of the family. Their younger daughter was forced to flee and discontinue her studies in Pakistan. Now the family has been living between three countries, and the ailing couple is unable to reunite with their children. When Professor Ismail’s wife Mrs. Uzlifat went to get her passport renewed, the couple were told of their names having been placed on the Exit Control List in October 2019. Eventually she received a government notification. The harassment of the Ismail family has been systemic and carried out methodically. Professor Ismail was forcibly disappeared for a few hours when he filed a petition to quash this case in October 2019. He was presented before the court, given bail, then denied bail in November and detained for a month. The couple were named in the terror financing case with their daughter in 2020.
In 2021, Professor Ismail was arrested for two months. “I have tried to note down the number of my appearances in various courts. In the ATC-1 of Peshawar, I have appeared 167 times, and appeared in ATC-2 for dozens of times. I have also appeared for the petition of PECA FIR against me each month before the PHC, but every time I am told the case is leftover” shared the professor.
After an accident on the Motorway, on their way to Peshawar from Islamabad, the professor decided to move to his hometown Swabi in 2021. The accident appeared deliberate to the couple, and to mitigate risks they began taking public transport for months to the court. The physical surveillance of the Ismail family, according to them, only stopped after release from Professor Ismail’s second release in April. However, the toll of the judicial persecution on the family’s financial condition and health of the senior couple has been immense.
Professor Ismail was imprisoned for a month in Haripur for wall chalking against General Zia as a student in 1978, for month in the mid 80s as a DSF (Democratic Students Federation) activist, charged with insult to religion by Islamist politicians in KP, and in the early aughts for trumped up corruption charges against his NGO —a case which was closed eventually. But he states that the hybrid regime of 2018 onwards was unlike what he experienced before. “Imran Khan government was shameless, for they lied continuously during my case. In the ATC, a man was produced who said he was from Jaish-e-Muhammad and claimed I had given him funds. Another claimed he sold us, my wife and I, weapons, and one supposed rickshaw driver claimed we helped Afghan citizens buy weapons from Darra Adam Khel,” he told The Friday Times. Professor Ismail claims police placed false evidence of his purchase of the car which was used to carry out bombing of the Peshawar All Saints Church. His academic research into progressive Urdu literature from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 has been used against him during the trial.
The targeting of Professor Ismail and his family is emblematic of how the state has attacked its progressives, critics of the military establishment and defenders of human dignity, specifically those from ethnicities other than the majoritarian group. What it also establishes is the degree to which the judiciary has been complicit in shutting down the movement for human rights. As the on-going trial on trumped-up charges comes to an end for the professor and he awaits a final verdict, another sword to keep him in check hangs on his head. In January 2023, he was indicted in the pending case of PECA from 2019. The next hearing will be in March. He was sick with Covid when that case was put on hold by the Peshawar High Court.
“I consider myself a subject of the state of Pakistan, not its citizens with equal rights. The judiciary is so compromised it has refused to give me any relief for years,” said the Professor.