PESHAWAR — Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Faisal Karim Kundi has handed preventive-detention powers to every deputy commissioner in the province, moving arrest authority under the Maintenance of Public Order (MPO) Ordinance from a single senior official to district administrations across KP in the first major detention-machinery step of the emergency administration.
A notification issued by the provincial Home and Tribal Affairs Department, announced on Wednesday, delegates the provincial government’s powers under Section 3(1) of the West Pakistan MPO Ordinance 1960 to all deputy commissioners, who are to act on cases and reports forwarded by their district police officers. The notification replaces a 2025 order under which the same powers rested with the Additional Chief Secretary (Home), which it renders ineffective.
“I have delegated powers under Section 3(1) of the West Pakistan MPO Ordinance 1960 to all deputy commissioners of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” Kundi announced, saying the decision — taken, in the notification’s words, “in the wake of the emergency declared in the province on October 11” — would reduce administrative delays, strengthen coordination with law enforcement and allow prompt preventive action on security cases. He directed the commissioners to exercise the powers strictly in accordance with the Constitution and the law and warned against any misuse, according to the Home Department’s statement.
An old power, a new holder
The delegation does not create a new legal power. Section 3 of the 1960 ordinance has long allowed the government to order the arrest and detention of a person to prevent acts deemed prejudicial to public safety or public order, and the statute itself permits that power to be delegated to subordinate officers. Deputy commissioners in KP wielded it extensively as recently as 2023, when they ordered detentions across the province after the May 9 unrest — orders the Peshawar High Court later quashed en masse, with the provincial advocate general telling the court some 2,000 people had been arrested under the law. In a May 2024 judgment, the same court faulted commissioners for producing “not even an iota of material” to justify a detention, grounding its review in the liberty and detention safeguards of Articles 9 and 10 of the Constitution, which require that a detained person be told the grounds of detention and that detentions be reviewed by an independent board.
What has changed is who holds the pen, and under what political authority. The delegation mechanism itself has been litigated before: in December 2023, the Islamabad High Court struck down a 1992 notification delegating the same Section 3 powers to the capital’s deputy commissioner, holding the delegation beyond jurisdiction, Dawn reported. Since October 11, KP has been under a proclaimed emergency and governor’s rule, approved by both houses of Parliament on October 14, after security forces detained the province’s chief minister and other elected leaders. The detention power now sits with district officers — a corps substantially reshuffled on the day the emergency was imposed, when, as PTI’s lawyers have told the High Court, 38 deputy commissioners were transferred at once.
Legal and political scrutiny
No party or rights body had issued a statement specifically on the MPO delegation as of Thursday. But the legal ground it lands on is already contested. The KP Bar Council has termed the emergency and governor’s rule “unconstitutional and illegal,” and lawyers boycotted courts across the province this week; PTI chairman Gohar Ali Khan has called the emergency a “grave political mistake” and vowed to challenge it on every constitutional forum, arguing that counterterrorism cannot justify setting aside the province’s mandate. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has separately condemned recent national moves to widen preventive-detention powers as a threat to liberty and due process. PTI’s petitions against the emergency itself return to the Peshawar High Court on November 10, and lawyers say the first detention orders signed under the new delegation are likely to be challenged in the same court that struck down the last round.
The move is the latest step in the unfolding KP emergency, whose legal architecture — and the fight over it — Zark News has tracked since the proclamation: see our explainer on how emergency and governor’s rule work in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Sources: KP Home and Tribal Affairs Department statement as reported by Voice of KP and Burak Digital; KP Digital News; Peshawar High Court judgments (2023–24); Zark News reporting.
