“You are an intellectual hero you presented the cases of the people in trouble legally and raised your voice in terms of common sense or reason.”
Mr. Ansar Burney is a famous and respectable lawyer of Karachi who is most of the time busy helping poor men, women, and children wrongly imprisoned or kept in mental hospitals. He offers all possible legal and economic (flow) help (assistance) to people who are kidnapped, cheated or troubled by any powerful person or group or force anywhere. He is a great, untiring helper of the unfortunate, the helpless and the poor. As a student leader himself, during the Martial Law of General Zia-ul-Haq, he was wrongfully arrested and imprisoned. When he personally observed the tragic condition of prisons, he decided to work for their improvement. When he saw the disappointing situation. in mental hospitals, he decided to work for their betterment. When he found thousands of poor people caught and tortured by the police, he took upon himself to get the innocent freed from police arrest or detention.[the_ad id=”17141″]
This great social worker visits jails, mental hospitals, orphanages, police stations, and other centers where completely helpless poor men, women, and children are detained (kept restricted) by government or social organizations. He interviews prisoners in jails and patients in mental hospitals taking down notes in his notebook. He makes lists of their problems and needs and takes practical steps to help them. He has tried to get the number of prisoners reduced in overpopulated jails. He has made great efforts to make the government and jail officers provide better medical and other facilities and entertainments to prisoners. Where he finds a mental patient or jail prisoner wrongly kept or treated, he readily provides legal help by discussing the matter with the authorities or by taking it to a court of law. In this. way, he has got thousands of people shifted or freed from mental hospitals, jails, police stations, etc. He helps victims of injustice thus through his Prisoners Legal Aid Society. To further help people in distress (centers), Ansar Burney has opened a welfare trust in Lahore.
His Welfare Trust in Lahore, like the Prisoners Legal Aid Society, works on a self-help basis. Without waiting for government help, and only with the help of its workers and generous donors, the Welfare Trust helps those who are rejected by society or are without any support against injustice.
[the_ad id=”17142″]Ansar Burney very bravely claims that about 80 percent of prisoners in jails are innocent. He feels that when a criminal is rightly caught, he is treated so badly in a jail that he becomes a greater criminal on release. So, he wants to have the required instruction and guidance for prisoners to make them proper citizens.
Ansar Burney is very happy when he is with mental patients and prisoners. Very often he spends the Eid festival with them and invites other people to do the same. He distributes sweets and clothes among them, talks and jokes, asks them questions and answers theirs in a most friendly way. As a result, they look upon (take) him as their friend and guide who is no less than a ray of hope in the darkness of poverty and injustice. He is much like Florence. Nightingale ‘who founded nursing to the relief of hospital patients around the world. He is living and working like Maulana Abdul Sattar Edhi to light the torch of freedom, equality, and justice in the forest of corruption that the world looks like to the poor, needy and helpless.
