KARACHI, Jan 18: Representatives of civil society organisations comprising those of lawyers, doctors, journalists, workers, peasants, women, students and human rights activists have expressed serious concern at the prevailing political situation; particularly the blatant attempts to subvert the democratically elected parliament and the constitution through crises manufactured on frivolous grounds.

In a resolution, unanimously passed at a meeting of over 100 representatives of civil society organisations at the PMA House on Tuesday, they called upon all arms of the state and their subsidiaries to function within their defined constitutional parameters to complement each other and not to attempt to undermine each other to the detriment of the public interest.

Prominent among the participants were Karamat Ali and Dr Aly Ercelan of the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (Piler), Uzma Noorani, Asad Iqbal Butt, Syed Shamsuddin and Munir Ahmed Memon of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), former adviser to chief minister Dr Kaisar Bengali, Dr S.

Tipu Sultan of the Pakistan Medical Association (PMA), Rahat Saeed Khan of Anjuman Tarraqi-i-Passand Musanifeen Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Shah of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF), Shireen Aijaz of Aurat Foundation, Taj Marri of the Awami Party Pakistan, Mir Askari of the NSF, Latif Mughal of the KESC People's Worker Union, Zahid Farooq of the Urban Resource Centre,Saleha Athar of the Network for Women's Rights, Abdul Waheed of Bright Educational Society, Shaikh Majeed of the PIA People's Unity, Dr Riaz Shaikh of SZABIST, Nasir Mansoor of Labour Party, Haleem Sharar of the Institute of Ethics and Culture, Noor Muhammad of the Pakistan Workers' Confederation, Mushtaq Ali Shah of the National Trade Union Federation, Hassan Athar of the Asia Human Rights Commission and Anwar Kamal of South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR).

The resolution stated: We assert that the principle of parliament being the supreme authority in the land is inviolable and it cannot be compromised under any circumstances.

We hold that the constitution defines three arms of the state: executive, legislature and judiciary and all other agencies are subsidiaries of the state, it added.

The civil society representatives maintained that the role of elected representatives of the people was to represent interests of their constituents and arrive at negotiated agreements to differences, without pressure from extraparliamentary sources.

They said the role of the judiciary was to protect the rights of the citizens from arbitrary abuse of executive power and act when there was an explicit violation of laws or the constitution or human rights and not to itself become a prosecutor or a source of arbitrary executive power.

They added that it was not onlyimperative that the judiciary was independent of the executive but also from individual and institutional biases, and proceeded with a mind free of extrajudicial influences.

They said that the role of the states security agencies was to act under stipulated constitutional provisions under the command of the executive and not to define what was or what was not in the national interest. The threatening tone of the ISPR statement with respect to the democratically elected Prime Minister of Pakistan was unacceptable, they added.

'We reassert that parliament is the voice of the people and the right to install or remove a government rests solely with the electorate and not with any agency or the courts. Governments may be incompetent or corrupt, but the sole judge of government's performance is the people. Any attempt to subvert the will of the people holds the potential to create conflict and endanger national integrity and must, therefore, be resisted.

They appealed to the people of Pakistan to stand united and firm in support of democracy and to resist all attempts, in the name of national security or combating corruption, to subvert democracy.

They recalled that the people had made great many sacrifices for the cause of democracy and they should not let unaccountable any opaque vested interests trample their rights to have a democratic and elected representative system in the country.-PPI