PESHAWAR, June 7: Condemning the recently promulgated Pemra (Amendment) Ordinance 2007, the legal community here on Thursday constituted a seven-member-committee for challenging it before the Peshawar High Court.

The committee was constituted at a joint general body meeting of the Peshawar High Court Bar Association and the Peshawar District Bar Association.

The members of the committee are Barrister Zahoorul Haq, Barrister Masood Kausar, Qazi Mohammad Jamil, Barrister Baacha, Mohammad Arif Khan, Abdul Samad Khan and Sattar Khan.

The PHCBA president, Abdul Lateef Afridi, told the meeting that the committee would coordinate with the journalists’ bodies for preparing a petition and filing it in the court.

He said a national conference to discuss the law and order situation in the NWFP and Fata would be held on June 16 at which leaders of major political parties and representatives of different civil society groups would participate. He added that invitations had already been extended to them in this regard.

Mr Afridi said the nation was passing through a defining period of history and the military ruler were taking anti-people steps in panic.

He added that the removal of the present “unconstitutional regime” now required little work.

Meanwhile, the Awami National Party has asked the superior judiciary to take suo moto action against the government’s media policies.

In a statement issued on Thursday, ANP’s president Asfandyar Wali Khan condemned what he called the unbecoming attitude of the National Assembly’s speaker towards protesting journalists on Wednesday.

He said the media people were being subjected to state-sponsored terrorism and high-handedness against them had now become a routine matter. Such tactics against the media gave the impression that the press was chained, he said.

Mr Khan said that in such circumstances, it was the duty of the higher judiciary to play its role by asking the government to explain reasons for such unlawful measures.

According to the Constitution, he said, freedom of expression was one of the basic rights of people, but the way journalists had been treated in the National Assembly was in total contravention of the Constitution.