June 08, 2007	Friday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 22, 1428

QUETTA, June 7: Lawyers on Thursday boycotted court proceedings in the city in protest against a new ordinance curbing freedom of the electronic media.

They took out a procession from the district court bar room and gathered outside the press club.

The lawyers torched copies of the amended Pemra ordinance and cautioned that if the government did not withdraw the black law, they would lay siege on the Pemra office in Islamabad.

Pakistan Bar Council vice-chairman Ali Ahmed Kurd and Baz Mohammad Kakar, president of the Balochistan Bar Association, said that lawyers would never accept curbs on the media which exposed excesses and injustices of the government.

Referring to the May 12 killings in Karachi and the promulgation of the Pemra ordinance, they said that the government was committing one mistake after the other since the filing of reference against Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry in the Supreme Judicial Council.

They said that lawyers, journalists, political parties and people at large had rejected the reference against the chief justice and the promulgation of the Pemra ordinance because both acts were aimed at suppressing independence of the judiciary and freedom of the media.—Correspondent