Re: New York Bar Association to honour Aitzaz Ahsan
http://thenews.jang.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=12629
Deposed CJ answers back Rashid Qureshi rejects Iftikhar’s charges
By Sohail Khan
ISLAMABAD: In an open letter addressed to the president of the European Parliament, the president of France, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and to the World Economic Forum, deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on Wednesday said President Musharraf had slandered him and his colleagues during his recent visit to Europe.
Advocate Athar Minnallah during a crowded press conference here at Islamabad District Bar distributed the copies of the letter among newspersons. “I am the Chief Justice of Pakistan presently detained in my residence since November 3, 2007, pursuant to some verbal and unspecified order passed by General Musharraf,” the letter begins with these words.
“If civilized norms of justice will not be allowed to operate than that space will, inevitably, be occupied by those who believe in more brutal and instant justice: the extremists in the wings,” Justice Chaudhry said.
Justice Chaudhry apprised the world community that he and his colleagues have been detained in their official residences since November 3, 2007.
“With me are also my spouse and three of my young children, all school-going and one a special child, and such are the conditions of our detention that we cannot even step out on the lawn for the winter sun because that space is occupied by police pickets,” said the deposed chief justice.
He asked the world community to take firsthand information of the barricades and his detention and that of his children from their ambassadors, High Commission representative in Pakistan.
“There can be no democracy without an independent judiciary and there can be no independent judge in Pakistan until the action of November 3 is reversed. Whatever the will of some desperate men the struggle of the valiant lawyers and civil society of Pakistan will bear fruit and they are not giving up,” Justice Chaudhry said.
He asked, “Is there a precedent in history, all history, of 60 judges, including three chief justices (one of the Supreme Court and two of Pakistan’s four High Courts), being dismissed, arrested and detained at the whim of one man? I have failed to discover any such event in medieval times under any emperor, king, or Sultan, or even when a dictator has had full military sway over any country in more recent times. But, this incredible outrage has happened in the 21st century at the hands of an extremist general out on a ‘charm offensive’ of western capitals and one whom the West supports.”
AP adds: In the letter Justice Iftikhar said: “Barbed-wire barricades surround the residence and all phone lines are cut. Even the water connection to my residence has been periodically turned off. I am being persuaded to resign and to forego my office, which is what I am not prepared to do.”
Rashid Qureshi, Musharraf’s spokesman, dismissed Chaudhry’s claim he was under house detention, saying he was in fact illegally occupying an official residence that he had been asked to vacate.
Qureshi also rejected Chaudhry’s description of the president as an “extremist general.” “The world recognises him as a moderate and a balanced personality. He has been working for the last eight years to make Pakistan’s conservative society into a moderate one,” he said.