July 12, 2003	Saturday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 11, 1424

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ISLAMABAD, July 11: The Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) and the People’s Party Parliamentarians have expressed their reservations about the contempt of court ordinance promulgated by President Gen Pervez Musharraf on Thursday.

PML-N’s acting chief Makhdoom Javed Hashmi, in a statement here on Friday, termed the new ordinance “unconstitutional”, and added that it was issued with “mala fide intentions.”

Mr Hashmi feared that this law would be used “against lawyers struggling for supremacy of the Constitution and freedom of the judiciary.”

He said the promulgation of the ordinance in the presence of parliament was another evidence of Gen Pervez Musharraf’s determination to “block the flourishing of democratic conventions in the country.”

“Gen Musharraf wants to keep the judiciary under his thumb like the already docile majority in parliament,” Mr Hashmi added.

PPP: A spokesman for the PPP, Senator Farhatullah Babar, in a statement on Friday said the party was surprised over the promulgation of the contempt of court ordinance.

He said that after the general elections and the coming into being of the National Assembly “the ordinance-making workshop of Gen Musharraf should have been closed down and the job of lawmaking left to the elected parliament.”

“It is a contempt of the elected parliament that the ordinance-making workshop has not been closed down,” he added.

He said: “The PPP believes that the dignity of courts should rest primarily on the soundness of court verdicts and on the integrity of the judges rather than on laws aimed at punishing those alleged to have committed contempt of court.”