July 29, 2006	Saturday	Rajab 2, 1427

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LAHORE, July 28: Supreme Court bar president Malik Mohammad Qayyum wants the superior judiciary to ensure that the next general elections are held in a transparent manner.

“The government manipulates elections and results but makes the supervisor of the entire process, the judiciary, a scapegoat. This is in fitness of things that the Supreme Court takes a suo moto notice of undemocratic dispensation and rises to the expectations of the people as it has done in several cases of fundamental rights”, Qayyum told a news conference on Friday.

He said the SC had recently delivered a landmark judgment in the Pakistan Steel Mills case and had also been taking keen interest in protecting fundamental rights of the people by issuing orders to the police to recover abducted people. “Such a trend is heartening but the people expected more of the apex court to take up national issues concerning the constitution and the democratic system of the country.”

Also a former judge of the Lahore High Court, Qayyum said if the apex court did not take up the issue of the 17th amendment on a petition filed earlier (by some individual), the SCBA would itself move the SC.

He said that the apex court should also resolve the controversy of the re-election of Pesident Gen Pervez Musharraf from the present assemblies as this constitutional matter had been lingering unnecessarily. He said the SCBA accepted Pervez Musharraf as the de facto president and in his personal view he had a good legal case if he decided to get re-elected from the present assemblies.

However, it was up to the judiciary to resolve the issue for which it should take up the matter under a suo moto action.

The SCBA president said that the apex court was also under a national obligation to see if the regime was taking care of certain uncompromising characteristics of the constitution like the Islamic ideology, federal parliamentary democracy, provincial autonomy and fundamental rights of the people as it was the custodian of the rights of the people which were inviolable.

He said the SC should also review its earlier decision of validating the military takeover under the doctrine of necessity because these decisions had paved the way for repeated interventions of the armed forces. But the time had now come that the apex court should clarify if the doctrine of necessity still held good under the circumstances that the latest military intervention had damaged the country beyond repair and a civilian rule seemed a distant possibility.

He said his father Justice Mohammad Akram was part of the Supreme Court which ruled in favour of the takeover of Gen Ziaul Haq in the Nusrat Bhutto case. But he had not inherited the same view and had his own thoughts about the country’s democratic dispensation.

In reply to a question, the SCBA president said that the association would actively participate in the International Judicial Conference being held in Islamabad between Aug 11 and 14 as part of the Supreme Court’s golden jubilee ceremonies.

He said it was a rare opportunity to interact with some 500 delegates, including chief justices of 60 countries, and show to the world that the bench and bar enjoyed excellent relations in Pakistan.

Malik Qayyum and other office-bearers of the SCBA thanked prime minister Shaukat Aziz for releasing a fund of Rs100 million for the construction of a hostel and other facilities for lawyers in Islamabad. They had met the prime minister in the federal capital on Thursday where he gave the cheque of the amount.