Skip to main content

US blogger appeals judge’s FIR order

ISLAMABAD: US blogger Cynthia D. Ritchie on Thursday filed an appeal against the directive of a court to the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to proceed against her in connection with the case of defaming former prime minister Benazir Bhutto on social media.

On June 15, additional district and sessions judge Mohammad Jahangir Awan had on a petition filed by Pakistan Peoples Party leader Raja Shakeel Abbasi directed the FIA to register a criminal case against Ms Ritchie.

Advocate Imran Feroz Malik, counsel for Ms Ritchie, filed the appeal against the judge’s order before the Islamabad High Court.

He contended in the petition that the sessions judge “has ignored the fact that under the FIA laws, registration of an FIR is not mandatory, it’s always subject to the result of an inquiry, and the FIA has been vested with the power to refuse to register the FIR if during inquiry the information is found to be false, hence an order directing the FIA to register FIR is otherwise against the express provisions of law, hence it is liable to be set aside.”

Mr Malik pointed out that the FIA had initially “discarded [the complaint] on the ground of locus standi [right of audience] as the complainant was not an aggrieved person within the meaning of Prevention of Cyber Crime Act, 2016”, adding that even then the sessions judge directed the FIA to proceed with the registration of an FIR.

Complainant Abbasi had taken the stance before the sessions judge that since Ms Ritchie “passed extremely derogatory remarks” against Ms Bhutto, the FIA did not entertain his application seeking registration of an FIR against the blogger.

Published in Dawn, June 19th, 2020



from The Dawn News - Home https://ift.tt/2YOmd8H
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trump says he urged team to ‘slow’ COVID-19 testing

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he was encouraging health officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered. The president has claimed falsely on several occasions that surges of COVID-19 in several states can be explained by greater numbers of diagnostic tests. At his first rally since the outbreak forced nationwide shutdowns in March, Trump told the crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma that testing was a “double-edged sword.” The United States — which has more deaths and cases than any other country — has carried out more than 25 million coronavirus tests, placing it outside the top 20 countries in the world, per capita. “Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” Trump argued. “So I said to my people ‘slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.” It was not clear from Trump’s tone if he was playing to the crowd, who ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sir Anwer Pervez, richest Pakistani British businessman, loses £432m in pandemic

Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, the founder and chairman of Bestway Cash & Carry has lost £432 million during the coronavirus pandemic to bring him down to No 50 on the richest British people list. The list has 1,000 people and is published by the Sunday Times newspaper . Pervez was at No 42 previously.  The 2020 list of the UK’s richest shows its first fall in wealth in a decade as Britain’s wealthiest people lost tens of billions of pounds in the coronavirus pandemic, the Sunday Times reported in its Rich List 2020. The newspaper, which has produced the respected annual ranking of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people since 1989, found the past two months had resulted in the super-rich losing £54 billion ($65 billion). More than half of the billionaires in Britain had seen drops in their worth by as much as £6b, a decrease in their collective wealth unprecedented since 2009 and the financial crisis. The Hinduja brothers, who topped last year’s list with a £22b fortune, saw among ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Despite reservations about jury, Pakistan to implement FATF reforms: envoy

WASHINGTON: Despite its reservations about the fairness of the jury which is to determine Pakistan’s performance against terror financing, the government is committed to implementing its action plan for dealing with this issue, says Islamabad’s Washington envoy Asad Majeed Khan. In a conversation with a prominent US scholar George Perkovich, recorded at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Monday afternoon, Ambassador Khan said the actions that Pakistan had taken so far to eliminate terror financing were “reflective of the political will”. “We feel that we have done a lot. We are also clear and determined to do more,” said the envoy while responding to a question about a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held in Orlando last week, which asked Pakistan to implement its own action plan for eliminating terror financing by October. Failing to do so could put Pakistan on a blacklist of violators and bring strict economic sanctions too. “But we w...
Post a Comment
Read more