Islamabad: The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has once again raised concerns over the health condition of its founder and former Prime Minister Imran Khan, his wife Bushra Bibi and senior party leader Ejaz Chaudhry, blaming neglect and restricted access to healthcare for their deteriorating medical condition.
The PTI stated that prolonged detention and restrictions to access medical facilities have worsened the issues faced by its leaders, causing serious complications in each case. Reportedly, Imran Khan and Bushra Bibi are suffering from serious eye ailments while Chaudhry’s kidney disease has progressed to third statge. The party has called for shifting Imran Khan, his wife and Chaudhry to proper medical facilities and getting them treated by personal physicians so that they may be treated with more vigilance and care, an editorial in leading Pakistani daily Dawn mentioned.
According to the newspaper, the demands raised by the party are not unreasonable and the authorities must try to agree to them. It should not lead to something untoward happening to these lawmakers, including cancer survivor Yasmin Rashid, while they fully rely on the government for their well-being.
“Regardless of whether one supports the PTI narrative of political persecution or the government’s insistence on due process and the letter of the law, the health and well-being of prisoners must not be turned into a matter of contention,” Dawn mentioned.
“There is no extra ‘justice’ that can be extracted by subjecting an individual already deprived of their civil liberties to prolonged solitary confinement, or restricting their access to family and personal physicians, or delaying shifting seriously ill prisoners to proper medical facilities. Such actions merely erode public trust in the entire system by sending the signal that the country’s administrative and judicial mechanisms are operating well short of the minimum standards expected of a civilised state,” it added.
Last month, Imran Khan’s son, Kasim, termed his father’s detention “arbitrary” and raised serious concerns over treatment by the Pakistani authorities which he said breaches international human rights conventions.
During the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) session in Geneva, Kasim Khan said that Imran Khan’s case was not an “isolated incident” but it was the “most visible example” of a much wider pattern of repression in Pakistan since 2022. He spoke about the detention of political prisoners, trial and conviction of civilians by military courts and journalists being “silenced, abducted or driven into exile,” Dawn reported.
Kasim Khan, who said that his father was being held in solitary confinement, also spoke about the general elections held in Pakistan in February 2024, reiterating PTI’s allegations that polls were rigged. He said that Pakistan had made commitments under the GSP-plus framework to uphold international human rights conventions, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the United Nations Convention against Torture.
He said that Imran Khan is not allowed to meet his family and being denied medical care. He also highlighted that the trial of civilians in military courts violated treaty obligations.
“My brother and I are not political people. We never wanted to come before bodies like this. [But] my father’s life demands that we take action. We cannot stand by as his health deteriorates and he is kept away from us. If the situation were reversed, we know he would not stop fighting until we were free. That is the very least we can do for him,” he added.
(IANS)
