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" ROLE OF COMMISSIONS ROLE OF COMMISSIONS IN PUBLIC INTEREST ENVIRONMENTAL LITIGATION IN PAKISTAN* By Dr. Parvez Hassan, Advocate and Ahmad Rafay Alam, Advocate Lahore A. Growth and Development of Public Interest Environmental Litigation The Pakistani judiciary has, over the past two decades, developed a dense jurisprudence of public interest environmental litigation ("PIEL") to enforce the constitutionally protected Fundamental Rights of the public. The pioneering judgments in Benazir Bhutto v. President of Pakistan and the Darshan Masih case recognized the limitations of the "Anglo-Saxon outgrowth" our system of adversarial litigation represented and sought to provide new procedural mechanisms to ensure substantial justice for large segments of society. More recently, the Supreme Court has taken suo motu notice of public interest issues as varied as the privatization of Pakistan Steel Mills Corporation Limited, the New Murree Development case and loan write-offs. The need, rationale and justification for developing the PIEL jurisdiction has been explained by Mr. Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani in State v. M.D. WASA:-- The rationale behind public interest litigation in developing countries like Pakistan and India is the social and educational backwardness of its people, the dwarfed development of law of tort, lack of developed institutions to attend to the matters of public concern, the general inefficacy and corruption at various levels. In such a socio-economic and political milleu, the non-intervention by Court in complaints of matters of public concern will amount to abdication of judicial authority. Development in the principles of PIEL has seen the rise of a remarkable number of PIEL "tools." These tools, which are in fact a…