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Judges in a bind over forest laws
PESHAWAR, Mar 29: Special forest magistrates in
the Provincially-Administered Tribal Areas are
facing difficulties because the NWFP Forest
Ordinance 2002 is not applicable over to those
areas.
It was learnt that the civil judges-cum-judicial
magistrates, who have been assigned powers of
special forest magistrates, could not decide in
Pata whether to conduct cases under the Forest
Ordinance promulgated by the NWFP governor in 2002
or under the previous laws.
One of the magistrate told this correspondent that
he had started hearing forest cases under the new
ordinance as previous laws carried lesser
penalties, adding that they were not adequate to
curb illegal felling of trees.
Under Article 247 of the Constitution, an act of
parliament or the provincial assembly or an
ordinance was not applicable to Pata unless the
governor, with the president's prior approval,
issued a special notification for its extension.
An official of the Forest Department said that the
promulgation of the Forest Ordinance was part of
the Forestry Sector Reforms Project, started with
the support of various donor agencies in the '90s.
Through the Forest Ordinance 2002, previous laws
were repealed, including the Forest Act, 1927, the
Hazara Forest Act, 1936, the Kohat Mazri Control
Act, 1953, and the NWFP (Sale and Sawing of
Timber) Act, 1996.
Under Section 93 of the Forest ordinance, all the
offence cases punishable under the ordinance
should be triable exclusively by the Forest
magistrate or in his absence by a magistrate of
first class duly empowered by the district and
sessions judge concerned.
After August 2001, when the executive magistrates
ceased to exist, the concerned district and
sessions judges assigned powers of forest
magistrates to different judicial magistrates
especially in the forest areas of the province.
According to the Provincial Forest Resource
Inventory, a study released in Jan 2000, 96.6
percent of the forested area in NWFP are
concentrated in the nine districts of which 50.8
percent are in five districts situated in PATA.
These districts are Chitral, Upper and Lower Dir,
Swat and Shangla. Rest of the 45.8 per cent of
forests are concentrated in four Hazara districts.
"The priority given by the government to
conservation of forests can be judged from the
fact that despite the passage of two years the
Forest ordinance is yet to be extended to PATA,
which is one of the major forest areas in the
province, " said a forest magistrate.
The DAWN |
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Pakissan.com; Advisory Point
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