WHENEVER the government is in a quandary and appears reluctant or hesitant to do something willingly, it finds no other way but to resort to dilly-dallying.
This has been witnessed on numerous occasions. These included restoration of judges, appointment of judges of the superior courts and the Supreme Court judgment on the NRO and its orders on the laundered money in Swiss bank accounts, to name a few.The latest is the setting up of a commission to investigate the May 2 US operation in Abbottabad.
The commission is headed by a Supreme Court judge, Justice Javed Iqbal. It has been reported in the press that the consent of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry had not been sought while appointing Justice Javed Iqbal as head of the commission.
The president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, Asma Jehangir, has correctly pointed out in her press statement that the executive cannot have a hand in the judiciary over and above the chief justice and, as such, the commission is illegal.
Moreover, according to the resolution adopted by a joint sitting of both houses of parliament, it was mandatory on the part of the prime minister to obtain the nod of the leader of the opposition on the constitution of the commission.
The resolution clearly stipulates: “The composition and modalities of the commission will be settled after ‘consultation’ between the leader of the house and the leader of the opposition”.
Again, the government seems to have its own interpretation of the word ‘consultation’. Again, the same controversy! Yet another astonishing aspect of this big mess was that a nominated member of the commission, Justice Fakhruddin G.
Ibrahim, had complained that his name was included in the commission without his consent.
With so many blunders (for inefficiency or intended) in the setting up of the commission with already so much delay, nothing is still clear about the powers of the commission and the timeframe for completing the investigations.
This has, perhaps, been left to the commission to waste more time in settling these issues and further delay its real function for which it has been set up.
As usual, there was also no expressed commitment by the government in unequivocal terms that unlike many previous commissions set up to probe other important issues, the report of this commission would be made public and its recommendations fully implemented.
E.S. Islamabad
