Re: Attorney General Qayyum meets PM advisor Rehman Malik
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/09/asia/pakistan.php
Chief justice’s return could be political land mine in Pakistan
By Jane Perlez
Published: April 9, 2008
ISLAMABAD: After contradictory signals and mounting pressure from Pakistani lawyers, the new democratic government appears poised to reinstate the Supreme Court chief justice dismissed last year by President Pervez Musharraf.
The restoration of the judge, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who was recently freed after four months of house arrest, has become the first real test of Pakistan’s new leaders and something of a political land mine.
The government now seems likely to restore the chief justice, but with conditions intended to blunt Chaudhry’s independence, a move that may prove to be a red flag to the hundreds of lawyers who have rallied around the hugely popular judge.
The fear Chaudhry strikes across the political establishment reflects his penchant for using the high court to take on popular causes that have rankled Pakistan’s leaders. His possible return, for instance, threatens to reopen the issue of whether Musharraf is now in office illegally, lawyers and politicians say.
He could also decide to revisit the cases of hundreds of Pakistanis missing in secret detentions, or decide to overturn a recent amnesty for politicians accused of corruption.
A prime beneficiary of that amnesty is the leader of the main party in the new governing coalition, Asif Ali Zardari, widower of the slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, who has been ambivalent about Chaudhry’s return.
Last week, Zardari assailed the judiciary at a meeting of the Pakistan People’s Party central committee, saying Pakistan’s judges had failed to come to his aid when he languished in jail for nearly 11 years on corruption charges that were never proved. To drive his point home, Zardari admonished Aitzaz Ahsan, the leader of the lawyers’ movement and Chaudhry’s chief defender.
Immediately after Zardari’s outburst, his party changed course and issued a statement saying the judges would be restored within 30 days of Parliament’s convening, as promised. Zardari repeated the pledge Monday.
Musharraf has reason to fear Chaudhry as well. In November, when it appeared that the Supreme Court would declare Musharraf ineligible for another term, the president issued an emergency decree and dismissed Chaudhry and a host of other judges.
He replaced them with judges loyal to him, led by Hameed Dogar, who then granted the president a second five-year term.
Chaudhry would now likely rule that the Nov. 3 emergency decree was illegal, said a former Supreme Court justice, Ahmed Wajihuddin, a judge who refused to take the oath of office for the Supreme Court when Musharraf grabbed power in a coup in October 1999.
“They all have their own problems,” Wajihuddin said of the political leadership. “Musharraf has a five-year term approved by the Dogar court.”
Zardari, he added, “has protection under the law” because of the same court.
“These are matters weighing on all of them,” he said.
The new government seems likely to try to finesse the issue while hoping not to antagonize Chaudhry’s supporters. There have been persistent reports in the past week that after the judges were reinstated the Parliament would be presented with legislation, perhaps a constitutional amendment, that would limit the terms of the justices to three years.
At the moment, Supreme Court justices must retire at 65. Chaudhry, 57, became chief justice in 2005 and has another seven years to go, a daunting prospect for many politicians.
Trying to calm anxieties, Ahsan, the president of the Supreme Court Bar Association and the leader of the lawyers’ movement, said that people should not be “paranoid” about what Chaudhry will do. He said Chaudhry was likely to recuse himself, as he has in the past, if a case was brought before the court on Musharraf’s future.
“The countdown has started,” said a triumphant Ahsan as he escorted Chaudhry on his return to a rousing welcome last week in his hometown of Quetta.
Chaudhry’s first request after his release from being confined for four months on the second floor of his Islamabad house was a trip to Quetta, where he was showered with rose petals during an eight-hour cavalcade from the airport to the city center.
The message of the homecoming was unmistakable: The lawyers’ movement was ready to do battle once again should the new government fail to live up to its pledges.
“By bringing about a silent revolution, the lawyers proved that now there will be rule of law and the Constitution in this country,” Chaudhry told the cheering lawyers who had accompanied him and were still willing to listen to him at 2 a.m after the slow-moving procession. “No other system can work and will not be accepted.”
A country lawyer, the son of a police officer in one of Pakistan’s most remote cities, Chaudhry would seem an unlikely champion of a political revolt. He refuses interviews and professes no political ambition for himself. But he has shown exceptional spine in a country where the courts have rubber-stamped military coups since 1958.
Many in Pakistan date the catalyst for the political turmoil that has ushered in the new government to the morning of March 9 last year, when Musharraf confronted Chaudhry in a room filled with the country’s top military brass and intelligence officials and demanded he step down.
Chaudhry refused to budge. He was then dismissed by Musharraf on charges of misconduct. After a legal challenge from Chaudhry, and weeks of protests by lawyers, a judicial council reinstated the chief justice last summer. There he remained until Musharraf issued his Nov. 3 emergency decree.
Babar Sattar, a corporate lawyer who supports Chaudhry’s reinstatement, said he did not approve of many of the chief justice’s decisions, but admired Chaudhry’s courage.
“When he was fired, it was not a question of whether he was a good judge or not, it was a question of an independent judiciary,” he said.
“He challenged the entrenched interests in the country and he was not getting anything in return,” he added.
A stocky figure with a mane of black hair who is known for a gruff, sometimes rude manner, Chaudhry lacks the polish of Pakistan’s leading lawyers, many of whom were educated abroad at Cambridge University or in the Ivy League.
Chaudhry, by contrast, received his law degree from the Law College at Hyderabad, in Sindh Province, a second-tier institution. In many ways his roots are closer to those of most lawyers in Pakistan, who work for daily wages from tiny ramshackle offices set up beside the lower courts across the country.
Once he became chief justice, Chaudhry quickly took up cases of the poor and the disenfranchised, a surprising turnabout for Pakistan’s courts, which have long favored the privileged and well connected.
In one case, he ordered the arrest of two police officers who were accused of raping a woman while in custody and were being protected by provincial authorities.
In another, he ordered that the brother of a high court judge be given a DNA test to ascertain whether he was in fact the father in a paternity suit.
Such decisions made headlines across the nation, and Chaudhry earned a reputation as the people’s judge. But soon his decisions bumped up against the cherished policies of the Musharraf government. That is when he ran into trouble.