THE crisis has been averted — for now. With the Supreme Court giving Aitzaz Ahsan, the prime minister’s lawyer, until Feb 1 to prepare his case for why Mr Gilani should not be moved against for contempt of court and the PM exempted from personally appearing, the judiciary-government saga has once again avoided a fiery denouement. After a week of speculation and build-up, both sides acted responsibly and with grace yesterday. There was no grand-standing or playing to the gallery and most of the proceedings were in keeping with the respect that should be accorded to them. The SC, by accepting Mr Ahsan’s request for time to prepare, helped avoid another week or two of the circus-like atmosphere that has gripped the country since Monday, when Mr Gilani was summoned to the court. Legal matters are best sorted out in a sober and serious environment and the country may finally get that now that the government has put forward Mr Ahsan to argue the PM’s case.

Perhaps the real reason for a peaceful end to proceedings in the court yesterday was that for the first time the government appeared to present a legal defence for its actions. Until yesterday, the PPP had chosen to respond politically to the court’s legal questions in the NRO matter, an approach that was never going to work. In fact, since the government was thwarted by its coalition ally, the MQM, in getting the NRO enacted by parliament, it has postured outside the courtroom and tried to play the victim card rather than explain on what legal grounds it was disinclined to write a letter to the Swiss authorities as demanded by the SC. If the president has immunity, something legal experts suggest may be true, particularly under the Vienna conventions, and the government believes that this precludes it from writing the letter while Mr Zardari is president, then that should be argued inside the courtroom, as it appears likely Mr Ahsan may do on Feb 1.

However, legal propriety and niceties aside, the crisis is clearly far from over. Seventeen judges of the SC declared the NRO null and void and demanded that the government write a letter to Swiss authorities in December 2009. Realistically, it seems unlikely the court will now accept that it misdirected the government in that judgment. Perhaps the only way out is through some kind of compromise on the contents of the letter that is to be written to Swiss authorities. It should not be beyond the collective legal brilliance in Courtroom No 4 to find a compromise solution.