KARACHI, Feb 19: The chief justices of seven South Asian countries will hold their seventh joint meeting here on Friday on the sidelines of the 10th Saarclaw conference.

Saarclaw was established by the legal communities of the member-states of the South Asian Regional Cooperation in Colombo in October 1991. It comprises lawyers, judges, academicians, law teachers, public officers and other law- related people.

Country chapters were established in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in the ensuing years. The organization is also active in Bhutan and the Maldives. Nine Saarclaw conferences have been held at Colombo, Dhaka, Jaipur, Karachi and New Delhi. The chief justices forum was institutionalized at the third conference.

The ninth conference, held at Jaipur (India) in September 2002, proposed to explore the vital interface between law and socio-economic change. It aimed at defining the basic parameters of the change, its speed, its direction and its content. The conference discussed the need and nature of fundamental reforms, the necessity to focus not only on growth equity but also on the use of law as an instrument of economic change.

The central theme of the 10th conference is 'leap forward to the next generation laws'. It will seek to explore the challenges that lie before the lawmakers, lawyers and society at large in the wake of the new laws enacted or need to be enacted to keep pace with the changed and ever-changing social, economic and technological scene.

It will focus on corporate governance, media legal framework, cyber crime, accountability, WTO and regional trade. The Saarclaw Pakistan chapter is headed by Justice G.H. Malik, a retired judge of the Sindh High Court. Vice-President Mehmood Mandviwala is chairman of the conference committee.

The conference, the second to be hosted by Karachi, will be inaugurated by Chief Justice Nazim Hussain Siddiqui in a local hotel. About 400 delegates from the seven Saarc countries, including senior lawyers and judges and chief justices, will attend it.