HYDERABAD: Senior Minister for Education Nisar Ahmed Khuhro has said that the chief justice of Pakistan must be part of judicial commission to be set up to hold an inquiry into the Panama Papers leaks that exposed a number of political personalities and their close relatives including prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s some family members alleging that they owned dubious offshore businesses.

Speaking to the media after the Sindh Agriculture University (SAU) convocation in Tandojam on Thursday, Mr Khuhro referred to an ending debate under way in the media and among members of the general public for weeks on the scam, and said people wanted to know whether the CJP himself would be part of the commission or not. “Its a popular demand that the CJP must be part of the commission,” he claimed.

Mr Khuhro said the judiciary must act on its own and was not supposed to seek advices from any authority so far as dispensation of justice was concerned. Once the Supreme Court had to apologise to the nation for not condemning imposition of martial law and this must not happen again, he said.

The minister criticised the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government for for “creating misunderstanding and using different tactics to portray itself as a victim of subjugation”. He observed that the federal government placed a huge advertisement in the print media to defend the prime minister only created an impression that some wrongdoing had to be covered up.

Mr Khuhro alleged that the PML-N had a history of spending millions of rupees on defaming and discrediting the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in the past but the latter never hit back over such revengeful actions.

“We are not running an advertisement campaign using the leaked Panama Papers to damage the image of the PML-N or its leadership. All we demand is a credible investigation into the matter,” he said.

The minister said the PPP wanted that the judicial commission should be headed by the CJP and there should be an acceptable time frame for it to complete and declare its findings

He hoped that the Supreme Court would not be attacked as was done during the past government of Mr Sharif and no judge would be victimised as was done during the Musharraf era.

Mr Khuhro also called for setting up a parliamentary committee to investigate the leaked papers relating to Pakistanis. The prime minister had the authority to send any of its members to jail but he could not unseat a lawmaker if the findings of the committee appeared unpleasant for the premier, he argued.

He said opposition parties consulting each other to evolve a consensus strategy was not a new phenomenon, adding that such things were common in many other countries.

Published in Dawn, April 29th, 2016