April 10, 2007	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 21, 1428

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MUZAFFARABAD, April 9: Three of the eight lawyers who had challenged the appointment of Justice Reaz Akhtar Chaudhry as chief justice of Azad Jammu and Kashmir have called upon the AJK Bar Council to hold an emergency meeting to devise an appropriate legal strategy to ensure the supremacy of Constitution, law and fundamental rights of the people of the state.

The petition seeking annulment of the chief justice’s appointment was submitted in the office of deputy registrar (judicial) of the AJK High Court on March 27, but it was recalled by the Supreme Court on the following day on the grounds that it contained scandalous and contemptuous matter against the judges.

Summoning the high court registrar under a contempt notice, Justice Khawaja Shahad Ahmed of the apex court had directed the officials not to entertain any such petition which amounted to contempt of the judges.

The petitioners, who included some sitting and former office-bearers of lawyers’ bodies, were however not served any such notice.

Three of them, Karam Dad Khan, Raja Sajjad Ahmed and Mushtaq Gillani, had urged the AJK Bar Council vice-chairman Shaukat Ali Kiani to call a meeting of the lawyers’ forum to discuss the issue. The bar council should review the implications of the “forfeiture of the authority” vested in the high court by the AJK’s interim Constitution (Act 1974), they had pleaded.

However, a source in the bar council told Dawn on Monday that the application seemed to have received a lukewarm response.

“It’s not clear if a meeting will be convened according to the desire of the applicants to discuss the sensitive issue,” said the source. The bar council is being addressed by AJK Prime Minister Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan in Kashmir House Islamabad on Tuesday.