KARACHI, May 20: Any constitutional package denying Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry his right to hold the office till 2013 will be resisted by lawyers with full force, the Sindh Bar Council and the Karachi Bar Association warned on Tuesday.

Addressing a press conference at the SBC office, the council’s executive committee chairman, Abdul Haleem Siddiqui, and KBA President Mahmoodul Hasan deplored that instead of undoing of the seventeenth amendment, for which the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal was castigated by the present ruling parties, there was talk of validating the provisional constitution order of November 3, 2007, through the eighteenth amendment.

They apprehended that Justice Iftikhar’s tenure as CJ would be curtailed and the retirement age of Supreme Court judges enhanced to enable Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar to hold the office of chief justice on the completion of Justice Iftikhar’s shortened tenure. All such moves would be thwarted, and the lawyers participating in the June 10 ‘long march’, since christened ‘Justice Iftikhar March’, would besiege the Parliament House in Islamabad. The sit-in would continue till the reinstatement not only of the CJ but of all the judges deposed on Nov 3, 2007. The judges who took a new oath under the PCO of that date would not be accepted, even through a constitutional amendment.

Replying to a question, they said they also believed in the supremacy of parliament but if it became a tool in the hands of a dictator, it must be set on the right path by popular will. They demanded impeachment of President Pervez Musharraf even if Justice Iftikhar was reinstated. Instead of the helpless members of the superior judiciary being threatened with ‘hanging’, they said, the new government should proceed against the dictator who had landed the country in a mess. “We have buried the doctrine of necessity and it is the turn of political parties to follow suit,” they declared.

A general body meeting of lawyers, they stated, would be held at the KBA hall on May 22. The parties belonging to the APDM, the PML (N), the human rights commission and other non-governmental organizations and members of the civil society would be invited to the meeting, which would be telephonically addressed by Justice Iftikhar at 11.30 am. A procession would be taken out to the Karachi Press Club after the meeting. All arrangements for the meeting and the march had been made by the KBA, the SBC and the Sindh High Court Bar Association, Advocates Siddiqui and Hasan said.

They said the convention of the lawyers’ representatives held in Lahore on May 17, which they also attended, had scheduled a conference at Faisalabad on May 24. The deposed CJ would travel by road from Islamabad to Faisalabad to address it. On May 31, the CJ would travel by road to attend a convention at Peshawar. The long march organizing committee would meet on May 23 to decide the venue of the starting point. It could be Sukkur, Multan or Lahore and lawyers from Karachi and Quetta and other parts of Sindh and Balochistan would converge at any of the three venues on June 9 to start the march. A delegation of the Bar representatives would visit the interior of Sindh to motivate and mobilize lawyers.

They advised the new government to shun President Musharraf’s pro-US policies lest the sense of deprivation and frustration rife in the tribal areas and Balochistan spill over the rest of the country. Pakistan should not fight an American war and destroy its own peace and ruin its economy, the lawyers said.