Civil society groups and environmental campaigners are preparing to lobby Governor Makhdoom Ahmed Mehmood to reject the Lahore Canal Heritage Park Bill recently passed by the Punjab Assembly.
The Lahore Bachao Tehreek (LBT) and the Lahore Conservation Society (LCS) say that the bill, whose stated purpose is to preserve the green belts along the Canal, is actually designed to allow the government to widen Canal Bank Road at will.
The bill stemmed from a legal challenge to a Punjab government project to expand Canal Bank Road in the Supreme Court in 2011. The court set up an arbitration committee to suggest a compromise solution. The committee allowed widening of a limited section of the road, but also recommended that the remaining green belts be declared a public trust and a park for public use. The court ordered the provincial government to legislate in this regard.
The Lahore Canal Heritage Bill was passed by the Punjab Assembly on January 8, though the civil society groups have been lobbying against it ever since its draft was made public. “We shared our reservations with the [Punjab Assembly] standing committee, but they ignored us,” said Ali Hassan Habib of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF-Pakistan). “If they form an advisory committee, I will boycott it.”
Under the bill, an advisory committee consisting largely of government officials can at any time ‘de-notify’ parts of the green belt as a heritage section, thus allowing development there.
“The de-notify clause exposes the government’s intent and makes the bill totally self-contradictory,” said Saima Khawaja, an environment lawyer and a member of the LBT and the LCS. The advisory committee should have equal civil society representation to reflect its public nature, she added.
Further, she said, the bill did not clearly define the area that was meant to be a public trust. She said that 400 kanals of green areas along the Canal were, under the Supreme Court’s decision, meant to be a public trust.
Habib said members of the WWF-Pakistan, the LCS and the LBT would meet the governor and urge him to return the bill with objections. “The fundamental flaw is that if the green belt along the canal has been declared a public trust by the Supreme Court, then there should be public ownership,” he said. “We are not expressing our opinion. We are pointing out how the bill is not in line with the Supreme Court’s decision.”
The environmental campaigners hope that if the governor agrees with them and rejects the bill, that the government will not have time to pass the bill again through the assembly in view of the upcoming end of its term. “The assembly will then be dissolved and hopefully the new members will have different priorities and the bill can be shelved permanently,” said one on the condition of anonymity.
Khawaja said that if the bill was signed into law and became an act, the groups would consider moving the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court is already hearing a petition against the Punjab government’s widening of Canal Bank Road beyond Dharampura, which Khawaja said the court had prohibited in the 2011 case.
Advocate General Ashtar Ausaf Ali, who in October had told The Express Tribune that the clause in the draft bill allowing the government to de-notify parts of the road to allow development had been removed, said that the standing committee was responsible for the bill in its final form.
Ali said that should the bill be challenged in court, he would act as the government instructed him to.
“The advocate general is bound to abide by the government’s instructions. But if the court calls the AG for advice, he is free to give his own opinion,” he said.
Environment Minister Manshaullah Butt was unavailable for comment.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 15th, 2013.