July 03, 2008	Thursday	Jamadi-us-Sani 28, 1429

LAHORE, July 2: The Supreme Court Bar Association has announced that it will hold another long march and stage a sit-in.

“The All Pakistan Lawyers’ Representative Convention being held in Lahore on July 19 will decide the date of the march,” SCBA secretary Chaudhry Ameen Javed said at a press conference here.

“We have no differences with the Pakistan Bar Council,” he said in reply to a question.

He said that unlike the last long march, this time the lawyers would hold a sit-in in Islamabad and would not leave till the reinstatement of the deposed judges.

The SCBA leader termed the June 9-14 long march highly successful and said that it had underscored the importance of reinstatement of the judges and conveyed a message worldwide that President Pervez Musharraf was a stumbling block in the way of democracy.

Mr Javed said the chief justice and other deposed judges would not be dragged into the movement which had been launched by the lawyers and would be taken forward by them.

He said the government did not appear to be sincere about reinstatement of the judges. He accused the government of engineering price hike to divert people’s attention from the judges issue.

He urged the Punjab chief minister to take steps to control the prices of items of daily use.

He said the lawyers’ movement would continue till its objectives were achieved.

SCBA vice-president Ghulam Nabi Bhatti said an international jurists’ conference would be held on the independence of judiciary.

The association’s executive members Khwaja Tariq Suhail, Shahid Jamil Khan, Malik Azeem, Rana Farman Ali Sabir, Imrana Perveen Baloch, Mudassar Bodla and media coordinator Mohammad Azhar Siddique were present at the press conference.