KARACHI : Wajih assails SC over waste of public money: Two-week-long debate on maintainability of pleas
By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI, Oct 1: Presidential candidate Justice (Retd) Wajihuddin Ahmed exhorted lawyers on Monday to brace themselves for a long-drawn-out struggle for the rule of law and supremacy of the Constitution.
Addressing the Sindh High Court Bar Association members in the SHCBA bar room, Justice Ahmed, who has been put up by lawyers, said he was not seeking the highest office but was fighting for the highest ideals of democracy and constitutional rule. The legal fraternity was in for a protracted struggle in which small battles could be won or lost but the final victory belonged to it. He warned lawyers against complacency after a successful round and despondency following a successful one. They should have their sights fixed on the ultimate goal.
The former Supreme Court judge, who declined to take an oath under the Provisional Constitution Order in 2000 and lost his office, criticized the Supreme Court decision in the so-called uniform case. He said it should not have taken the nine-member bench two weeks to reach the conclusion that the petitions were not maintainable. The judiciary was run on public money and it was sheer wastage of time to deliberate over non-maintainable petitions for two weeks. Naming names, he said two members of the bench had served as federal law secretary in violation of the SC judgment in Al Jihad Trust case, which barred judges from holding executive offices. One of them tried to persuade him to take an oath under the PCO the night before the swearing-in was scheduled. A third member of the bench had served as acting chief election commissioner to the satisfaction of the government.
A request, he said, would be made to Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry for hearing of his petition against the acceptance of President Pervez Musharraf’s nomination papers by all the judges of the Supreme Court minus the three judges named by him. The ex-judge urged the bar councils of all four provinces to proceed against Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada and Attorney-General Malik Muhammad Qayyum. He had no objection to their conducting government cases but their absence from the courtroom at the time of announcement of SC judgments in the CJ and Nawaz Sharif cases and presence at the time of rejection of petitions against General Musharraf indicated that they were more than ‘legal counsel’ They knew beforehand that the judgment was going to be pronounced in their favour, Justice Wajih said.
Another Supreme Court judge who lost his office following the 1981 Provisional Constitutional Order oath, Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim, said that the time to keep silent was over. The struggle was not new to lawyers; they had been waging it since the inception of Pakistan. They had always been in the vanguard of campaigns against military rule. If the civil society failed to assert, it would be in for a long spell of authoritarianism, he warned.
