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| March 27, 2007 | Tuesday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 7, 1428 |
Lawyers boycott court proceedings
LAHORE, March 26: Lawyers on Monday boycotted court proceedings in the city and elsewhere in Punjab to express solidarity with opposition parties, which held protest rallies against the ‘suspension’ of Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.
Separate hunger strike camps by various groups of lawyers have also been set up at the high court and other subordinate courts. Various opposition leaders, including Khalid Kharal and Mushtaq Awan of the PPP, also visited the camps.
Lawyers wore black armbands and hoisted banners and posters inside and outside the courts to express solidarity with the nonfunctional chief justice.
‘Go Musharraf Go’ and ‘No Musharraf No’ were slogans among others, which the lawyers chanted at the camps besides making demands for the restoration of the nonfunctional chief justice. “This is a campaign against dictatorship. This is a campaign against illegal acts of the government. We will continue our struggle till the restoration of the nonfunctional chief justice,” high court bar association president Ahsan Bhoon said while talking to reporters at one of the camps.
Dozens of lawyers, later, received the rally organised by the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy (ARD) at The Mall’s gate of the high court. They joined the protesters in chanting anti-government slogans.
Reports reaching here from other parts of the province also say that lawyers did not appear in majority of the cases and set up hunger strike camps.
HAMEED GUL: Former chief of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Hameed Gul said political parties instead of playing their due role in the present crisis in the country were waiting for a green signal from Washington.
Addressing a gathering of lawyers at Awan-i-Adl, the former ISI chief lauded efforts of the legal fraternity for launching a campaign against dictatorship. He said the judiciary, which had always been a last hope for people, had been made a target by the government. He said there had been no such example in Pakistan in which a dictator in uniform summoned the chief justice of Pakistan and forced him to resign.
Hameed Gul said the present scenario was not going to end soon, and it would become a turning point in Pakistan’s history. “It is a beginning of a revolution, which will take the crisis to a logical end.” —Staff Reporter
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