ISLAMABAD: Attorney General (AG) Ashtar Ausaf assured the Supreme Court on Monday that after Mehmood Bashir Virk takes the oath as the new law minister on Tuesday (today), a prosecutor general for the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) will be appointed within a week.

The AG put forward this assurance before a two-judge SC bench headed by Justice Gulzar Ahmed. On Jan 3, the court had ordered the AG to explain why the government was taking such a long time to appoint someone to the office of NAB prosecutor general which had fallen vacant on Nov 23, 2017.

The court had been told earlier that one of the two accountability courts in Islamabad was without a presiding officer, while the tenure of the only judge presiding over the accountability court on additional charge — Judge Muhammad Bashir — was set to expire in March. Judge Bashir’s accountability court is seized with a number of corruption references, including the ones against former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his family, and former finance minister Ishaq Dar.

However, Mr Ausaf had argued that the government should not have to shoulder the blame for the delay in appointment of the presiding officers because the Islamabad High Court had not provided a list of nominees for the position, despite having been sent several reminders. The AG assured the court that he would personally talk to the IHC chief justice and request him to speed up the process. Such appointments would be complete within the next 10 days, AG promised.

The court asked the government to develop a mechanism so that the process of appointing judges could commence before their terms expired. Observing that a lot of cases had been put on the back burner because of these delays, the court asked the law ministry to submit a report within two weeks on the appointment of the NAB prosecutor general and accountability judges.

In a separate case, Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar, while heading a three-judge SC bench, regretted that governments were yet to initiate judicial reforms and announced that the judiciary would step in and fill this gap by introducing reforms from next week.

While hearing another case about admission guidelines issued by the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) for private medical colleges, the SC issued a notice to Dr Asim Hussain, a confidante of former president Asif Ali Zardari, with a direction to appear in person on Wednesday.

The notice was issued after Advocate Muhammad Akram Sheikh, while representing the PMDC, accused Dr Hussain of regulatory capture of the council under his leadership, as he was the PMDC chairman and vice chancellor of the Ziauddin Medical and Dental College.

It was during Dr Hussain’s time that private medical colleges were affiliated with the council in such a large number that these colleges overwhelmed independent professionals from public medical colleges, the counsel argued.

Referring to the admission policy of medical colleges, the chief justice observed that the court would also consider the vires of various universities created to affiliate a large number of private medical colleges.

Published in Dawn, January 9th, 2018