IT is all very fine that PCO judges who offered unconditional apologies have been admitted to the court's indulgence and the contempt notices recalled.

But one question that agitates all thinking minds is whether it would be appropriate for some of them after pardon to continue holding high judicial offices which they wangled or were bestowed on post-retirement as the government's bounty.

Clearly, in the case of PCO judges it was no ordinary contempt, consisting in non-compliance of a court's process, obstructing 'justice'.

Here is an altogether different genre, an unmitigated institutional betrayal or veritable defection by some gnomes of the highest judiciary in aid of generalissimo's hubristic coup de main to zap the Constitution for nothing nobler than lucre or lure of office.

The way they went grovelling under the table in front of the Lord Protector, apart from disgracing them, had serious knock-on effects to the point of shaking the very foundation of the polity.

They first unabashedly defied the court when they found it profitable to defy and then were no laggards to apologise when it came to save their bacon.

This is opportunism par excellence; and to me an uncanny reminder of abominable 'simony' being practised in mediaeval ecclesiastical Europe where pardons and benefices were bought and sold.

True, most of the contemnors, who in some cases still had many years to go, had to buy their pardon by seeking premature retirement which by itself is punishment enough.

But what about others who have not taken a similar knock? To let them remain ensconced in their new-fangled offices on the presumption that the court's pardon has bleached them through and through is a postulate one cannot reconcile with. For, there is certainly something about chastised contemnors holding high judicial offices which is not kosher, technical niceties aside.

Pardon in any case can at best save the contemnors from the punitive arm of law but cannot purge them of the stench of a festering moral stigma which by its pungency will ever neutralise all the perfumes of Arabia.

MUZAFFAR H. MALIK

Former Chief Judge,

Northern Areas Chief Court

Islamabad