PESHAWAR: The leaders of Prosecution Officers Welfare Association (Powa) on Tuesday called of their province-wide strike, claiming that they held successful negotiations with the government for the acceptance of their demands.

The public prosecutors across the province had started strike on Sep 19 on the call of Powa, which had put forward multiples demands for acceptance by the government.

Powa president Sangeen Shah stated that they had very fruitful meeting with the additional chief secretary (home), Mohammad Abid Majeed, who admitted that their demands were genuine and would be placed before chief minister for consideration.

He said that threadbare discussion took place in the meeting on all of their demands. He added that the ACS took keen interest in their issues and promised that their meeting with the chief minister would be arranged.

Powa leaders say they held positive meeting with ACS

Mr Shah said that on the commitment made by the ACS the strike was called off conditionally for the time being in the best interest of people and prosecution. He paid tributes to cabinet members of Powa as well as prosecutors for showing unprecedented unity among their ranks for the successful strike.

The main demands of the prosecutors include setting up of an independent prosecution department, establishment of prosecutor general office on pattern of other provinces, provision of 1.5 running basic pay or equivalent special allowance on the pattern of judiciary and police; residential facilities for regional directors at divisional level and district public prosecutors at district level; offices for all prosecution officers specially females including washrooms and prayer rooms; official vehicles for all regional directors, district public prosecutors and prosecutors of anti-terrorism courts and other special courts; provision of prosecution and utility allowances to supporting staff on pattern of Punjab and Balochistan; and applying four-tier service structure formula to prosecutors.

During the strike, the prosecutors mostly stayed away from official work and didn’t appear in cases on behalf of the government before courts.

They had not been performing any official work including supervision of investigation, tendering opinion in cases, scrutiny of cases, receiving of cases from police stations, forwarding any sort of applications and challans, putting cases in court, case management and monitoring system etc.

The association claimed that early this year the government had made commitment that their demands would be fulfilled but had so far been delaying the matter.

Published in Dawn, September 25th, 2024