The bill aimed to give effect to changes made in light of recommendations by the Supreme Court in an October 21 order. — Photo by APP

ISLAMABAD: Relying on the consensus of an all-party parliamentary committee, the National Assembly made a quick work of a constitution amendment bill that meets most of the Supreme Court's concerns over a new mode of appointing superior judiciary, but was denied unanimity in approving it with a single negative vote cast in an apparent punishable party defiance.

The final vote on the seven-clause Constitution (Nineteenth Amendment) Bill came to 258-1 — more than the required two-thirds majority of the total membership of the 342-seat lower house — in what both government and opposition said belied prophecies made about a clash between the parliament and judiciary.

The bill drafted by the 26-man Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Reforms, which also authored the landmark 18th Amendment that introduced a parliamentary role in top judicial appointments and was unanimously adopted by both houses of parliament in April, must now go to the 100-seat Senate.

Parliamentary sources said a Senate session might be convened before the end of this month to give the present parliament the honour of adopting two key constitution amendment bills within this year.

The total attendance at the lower house sitting on the third day of the new session, according to the final vote count in what is called a division in parliamentary parlance when members record their votes by moving to different “ayes” and “nays” lobbies, was 260, including Speaker Fehmida Mirza, who did not cast her vote while presiding over the house.

President Asif Ali Zardari, now visiting Turkey, sent a message of felicitation for parliament from Istanbul, saying the smooth passage of the bill had “belied those who talked of a clash of institutions”.

A government press release quoted the message as felicitating all political parties and their members for showing “maturity, wisdom and farsightedness” in passing the bill, which he said would “strengthen democracy and its vital institutions”.

The house took up the bill immediately after Senator Raza Rabbani, chairman of the parliamentary committee and adviser to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, introduced it, dispensing with a requirement of sending the draft to a house standing committee for its report.

The count of separate voting for each of the seven clauses of the bill, exercised by members by standing — as attendance continued to improve with the passage of time — ranged between 239-0 and 242, more than the required minimum of 228 members.

An earlier vote for a motion for dispensing with a rule of procedure to refer the bill to a house committee stood at 234-1, with Kashmala Tariq of the opposition PML-Q voting against the move.

Her lone vote again against the bill in the division could have put her membership of the house on a special seat for women at risk though she explained in a speech later that she in fact supported the new amendments but her apparent defiance of her party's decision to vote for the bill was only “symbolic” to protest at the failure of the parliamentary committee to rectify what she called a “dictatorial position” given to party heads in the 18th Amendment.

Article 63A of the Constitution cites voting against the directives of one's parliamentary party on a money bill or a constitution amendment bill among grounds for “defection” for which a party head may seek a member's disqualification by the Election Commission.

Before the final vote, Senator Rabbani explained some salient amendments made in the light of an Oct 21 order issued by the Supreme Court after hearing several challenges to the 18th Amendment mainly against parliament's role in judicial appointments.

They include increasing the strength of a Judicial Commission — to be headed by the Supreme Court chief justice and meant to nominate candidates for appointments to the apex court and high courts — to nine from seven and of the senior-most judges of the same court as its members to four from two, besides a former judge of the apex court to be named by the chief justice, the federal law minister, the attorney-general and a senior lawyer to be nominated by the Pakistan Bar Council, for whom a new amendment fixed 15 years as the minimum experience.

Some other amendments provide that an eight-member parliamentary committee — with equal membership from the treasury and opposition benches and from both house of parliament — that must finally approve nominations by the Judicial Commission would hold its meetings in camera but record its proceedings and send its approval or rejection of nominations to the prime minister rather than the president, who is to finally notify an appointment, while the body would be exempted from a constitutional bar on discussing the conduct of judges in parliament.

Mr Rabbani rejected what he called a wrong media report suggesting that an amendment requiring the chief justice to consult other members of the Judicial Commission in the appointment of ad hoc judges was a curtailment of the chief justice's powers.

The committee did not agree to suggestions in the court order to make rejection of a Judicial Commission nomination justiciable, or subject to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and that a re-nomination of a rejected nominee be considered final, sticking to the original provision in the 18th Amendment for the commission to give a new nominee.

Prime Minister Gilani, whose cabinet approved the bill at a meeting before the draft was introduced in the house, said in a brief speech the vote had dispelled what he called an “impression” created by unspecified quarters that “parliament and judiciary cannot pull on together” and that the present parliament, by undoing distortions introduced by military dictators, had proved it could maintain the vision of the “founding fathers” of the 1973 Constitution.

The opposition PML-N's Ahsan Iqbal, in a speech after opposition leader Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan of his party had left the house after the voting, described the new method of judicial appointments as worth following by many other democracies in the world and called for a similar procedure for appointments of heads of big state enterprises and non-career diplomats as ambassadors.

Before the house was adjourned until 10am on Thursday, tribute for the house and the parliamentary committee also came from speakers from other parties, including the opposition PML-Q, the coalition partners MQM and ANP, independents from Fata, minorities and JUI-F.

The bill aimed to give effect to changes made in light of recommendations by the Supreme Court in an October 21 order.