Legal News

Lawyer-Led Protests Lead to Reinstatement of Pakistan?s High Court

By Dan Slater

International politics typically falls way outside the Law Blog’s long-arm statute. But in the last six months we’ve been keeping a close eye on Pakistan, partly because an unbelievable drama is unfolding as the U.S.-backed president, Pervez Musharraf, faces mounting political opposition. But mostly because, among the country’s many rifts is a battle pitting Musharraf against Pakistan’s legal community — namely, its judiciary, led by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry.

Ever since November 3, when Musharraf declared a state of emergency, Chaudhry and the other justices have been under under house arrest. Musharraf’s critics in Pakistan — led largely by protesting lawyers — contend he dimissed the judges out of fear they would invalidate his presidency, and have been calling for the judges’ reinstatement.

Now it looks like Chaudhry and his judicial colleagues are making a comeback, thanks to a power-sharing deal, struck over the weekend, between the political parties of Nawaz Sharif and the late Benazir Bhutto. Click here for an NYT story from this morning.

Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, and the party of former Prime Minister Sharif, the Pakistan Muslim League, have announced a deal that, reports say, could clear the way for the formation of an anti-Musharraf civilian government, as well as the reinstatement of Chaudhry, and some 60 other judges who’ve been detained. (Bhutto’s party has 120 seats in the 342-seat National Assembly. Sharif’s party has 90 seats. By joining forces, they’d come close to the two-thirds majority required to make changes in Pakistan’s constitution.)

Yesterday, the NYT, reporting on a protest held in Islamabad on Saturday, quoted Aitzaz Ahsan (pictured), the leader of the lawyers’ movement, saying: “Our struggle is to make Pakistan a state where the judiciary is independent, and what Musharraf did to the chief justice is an example of how under him no judge is ever independent.”

According to the NYT, the U.S. is trying to “dampen enthusiasm” for Chief Justice Chaudhry. Tariq Mahmood, the former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, met with the United States ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson. Referring to the meeting, Mahmoud reportedly said he got the impression that the United States was more concerned with Musharraf and the fight against terrorism than with an independent judiciary.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 10, 2008 (boomark / email).