PESHAWAR: Peshawar High Court Bar Association has expressed concerns over the Supreme Court order, which restrained Justice Qazi Faez Isa from hearing any case against Prime Minister Imran Khan, and demanded that the restriction should be removed.

In a statement issued here on Monday, Peshawar High Court Bar Association president Khalid Anwar Afridi called upon the Chief Justice of Pakistan and rest of the judges of Supreme Court to put an end to exercise of quelling the voice of other judges, who disagreed with them, for sake of maintaining independence of the judiciary.

He said that the concept of judicial recusal required a judge to self-evaluate whether it would be appropriate for him to hear a particular case or not.

“The decision to recuse is ultimately one which the judge in question has to make and it cannot be made on his behalf by colleague judges, when sitting as co-members of the bench or otherwise,” he said, adding that such had been the practice in England from time of Sir William Blackstone and in the United States from the time of Chief Justice John Marshall.

Mr Anwar said that if the decision to recuse had to be made by other members of the bench on behalf of a judge, then this essentially meant that the judge, on whose behalf the decision was being made, was incapable of making that decision.

“By making the judgment call for and on behalf of Justice Qazi Faez Isa to recuse him from cases involving the prime minister, the chief justice and other honoruable judges have essentially accused Justice Qazi Faez Isa of being incapable of upholding his basic oath of office as a judge of the Supreme Court,” he stated.

The PHCBA president maintained that the exclusion of Justice Qazi Faez Isa from certain kind of benches and from hearing cases related to certain kind of entities naturally led to the logical inference that voice was being quelled.

“It seems that Pakistan has pioneered a new law where through judicial edict we exclude dissenting judicial voices from benches and certain class of cases involving the powerful, taking away the prerogative of judges to self-recuse,” he said.

Mr Anwar said that such despotic practice was followed in no other legal system and it was worrying to see that it was taking root in Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, February 16th, 2021