Why the Chief Justice can't be restored

This article by Kamran Shafi provokes questions and offers suggestions as to why a sitting government cannot allow the Chief Justice of Pakistan to continue his constitutional term as the supreme court CJ. Perhaps he shook too many pillars of power too quickly. While he performed heroics unseen before in living memory, perhaps he did not have the tact that, say Justice Marshall, had when he was successfully securing the right of judicial review from the executive and legislature.




Most Blameless of them all
By Kamran Shafi

What in the world did My Lord Iftikhar Chaudhry do to deserve any of this? How does he, of all people, deserve to be disgraced in the manner that every Tom, Dick and Harry in the old dispensation, and every Tom, Dick and Harry in the present one, disgraced/are disgracing him? Or tried/are trying to?

If I have my facts right, CJ Chaudhry was a hardworking, diligent judge who did a lot of good for the litigants in the Supreme Court, and by example in the other high courts of Pakistan during the time he was CJ of this luckless country.

If I recall, there were something like 33,000 cases pending before the Supreme Court at the time that he became chief justice on June 30, 2000, and despite the fact that almost 30,000 fresh cases were brought before the court during his tenure, the Supreme Court roster stood at 11,000 by the time that he was illegally and unconstitutionally thrown out of office by the Chief of Army Staff.Add to all of the above cases at least 7,000 to do with human rights which were brought before the human rights cell set up by himself and you get a fair idea of how hard he worked and what a good job he did for the very vast majority of Pakistanis.

Indeed, the yeoman service he did for human rights and which finally cooked his goose as far as our American buddies are concerned is when he demanded to know the whereabouts of some of the disappeared whose families had come before him as petitioners. And wonder of wonders found some of them languishing in Pakistan Army quarter guards (shame on you, gentlemen) on cooked-up charges — one of which, if I remember correctly, was an affair-of-the-heart-with-a-senior-army-officer’s-niece-gone-wrong. And other such. In none of which cases did the CJ order any release, or pre-judge: all he did was order that the accused would henceforth be kept in a proper, recognised jail and that one of his court’s officials would be the guardian of the prisoner.

If I have my facts right, this is the man who did much good in the eyes of most Pakistanis, including issuing orders to halt the despoliation of forests to make a new hill station near the already overbuilt Murree which was meant to reap huge monetary benefits for the then sitting government of Punjab and its cronies; the stopping of the mini-golf and junk-food money-spinner in the F-7 Markaz which would have precluded the poor using the park; the banning of the use of the Doongi Ground in Lahore for the self-serving (and idiotic) purpose of setting up an IMAX cinema (I ask you); and last but not least questioning the sale of the Steel Mills at a throwaway price.

This is the man who was summoned by Gen Pervez Musharraf, the then Chief of Army Staff and ‘President’ of Pakistan to Army House one spring day, March 9, 2007 to be precise, and in the presence of the Corps Commander 10 Corps, DG ISI, DG MI, DG IB and sundry other military officers told to resign. This is the man who sat, hands folded, in front of the great and mighty general — we saw it all on live television, did we not, only the script went horribly wrong when he said, quietly, “I will not resign”.

As an aside, one hears that all hell broke loose then, with Gen Musharraf losing his cool (to say the least) and storming out of the room hurling invectives at the chief justice, at which time the others in the room, with the sole exception of Ashfaq Kayani the then DG ISI, also getting into the act and warning the CJ of dire consequences if he refused to go quietly.

If memory serves, thousands of lawyers and members of civil society, even respectable old men, and women, came out on to the streets in support of the CJ. Hundreds of them, mainly lawyers, yes even old men and women, were beaten black and blue and bloody and dragged to police trucks and vans and hauled off to jails for months on end. If one recalls, with great anger I might add, even while being dragged or half-carried to the trucks three and four and five louts in civvies thrashed the arrested on and about the face and head quite mercilessly.

As another aside, it came back to me at the time that we really had not evolved into full human beings as yet; that we were still on a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder; that there was a long way to go until we got to human status. Juxtaposition was there: in those days — just after the March 9 stupidity. There was some trouble in Russia and one of the former Soviet republics. People were being arrested there too: one policeman on either side of the arrestee marching him/her off to a police truck or bus. Not one policeman lifted a hand against any of the protesters, let alone thrashed them.

But back to My Lord Iftikhar Chaudhry. Is the man who stood up and said no to a military dictator to be treated this way? Is the man whose defiance of an army dictator led to an uprising by two important sections of society — lawyers and civil society — and which hastened the demise of the dictatorship, to be treated this way? By lies and deceit and trickery and duplicity?
Does Attorney General Khosa, who is fast proving himself to be more than a fitting replacement for the unlamented Malik Qayyum, really think he can get away by saying that Mr Dogar is a “constitutional” CJ and therefore My Lord Iftikhar Chaudhry cannot become chief justice?
Was CJ Chaudhry removed constitutionally?

More than anything else, the People’s Party has always stood for constitutionality and democracy that comes when you follow the constitution. How in the world can it justify what its Toms, Dicks and Harrys are saying today? Does Asif Zardari really think he can live this down?
In the end, I am told the Foreign Office advised Asif Zardari that putting off the China visit for a ‘private’ visit to London first wouldn’t be a problem. Who are the core-professionals trying to fool? The ancient and cultured Chinese, where loss of face is a slight, worse than any other? Yousuf Raza Gilani started it all by going to the US first (and not to China at all — the Olympics junket in which Pakistan did disgracefully does not qualify as a state visit), and now Zardari does it by going to the UK — and thence to the US(?) before visiting our great friend AND great neighbour.

The portents are bad already.
kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk