LAHORE: The Judicial Commission’s rejection of cases for confirmation/ extension of tenure of 15 additional judges of the high courts has spawned calls for formulation of transparent criteria for the appointment of judges to higher judiciary.
The commission at its meeting last month did not find 10 additional judges of Lahore High Court and five of the Peshawar High Court fit for confirmation or extension. The affected judges have already stopped working and their names have been removed from roster.
Legal experts said the commission’s decision was final.
“The parliamentary committee has the authority to examine only the commission’s recommendations for the appointment of judges. The cases of additional judges found unfit for confirmation or extension will not be considered by the parliamentary committee,” according to a senior Lahore-based lawyer.
“No reason has been assigned by the commission for rejecting the cases of some judges and giving extension to the others,” one of the affected judges, who requested anonymity, told Dawn. “The entire proceedings (of the commission) are shrouded in strict secrecy, which is against the principles of transparency and justice,” he argued.
According to him, the affected judges had the right to know the reasons for rejection of their cases.
Another affected judge, who contacted this reporter through a person close to him, stressed the need for formulating transparent criteria in the matters of confirmation or extension of tenure of additional judges.
He said: “The matters had been made worse for us by insinuations made in the media that we had lost our jobs because of our incompetence.
“That is a complete misrepresentation of facts. Some of us have decided maximum number of cases during our tenure. The quality of our judgments can be gauged from the fact that they have been included in law journals.”
Nine of the 10 affected LHC judges were from the Multan/Bahawalpur benches, and only three of them had worked on the principal seat in Lahore and that too for just three months. A total of 10,000 cases are claimed to have been decided by them in just six months.
The affected judges are of the view that the purpose of changing the procedure of appointment to the higher judiciary had been defeated by the secrecy being maintained by the judicial commission.
“We don’t know if our performance was discussed in the meeting of the commission at all. We also don’t know what reasons were assigned for rejecting our cases,” a judge said.
Giving the example of one of his affected colleagues, the judge implied that “a few of us might have been thrown out because our decisions in certain political cases did not please certain people in the commission”. He was of the opinion that the parliamentary committee for the appointment of judges should also have powers to look into the “reasons”, if any, assigned by the commission for confirming or extending the tenure of some judges and rejecting the cases of others.
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