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Pakistan: Judicial Crisis Adds To Pressure On President

By admin | March 24, 2007

President Pervez Musharraf’s recent suspension of the Pakistani Supreme Court’s chief justice has been met with protests by lawyers and judicial officials across the country,
increasing pressure on Musharraf’s embattled goverment.
Iftikhar Chaudhry’s March 9 dismissal brought sizable crowds out into the streets of major Pakistani cities including Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi.

Some 3,000 lawyers boycotted court proceedings in Peshawar on March 22 and blocked a road. And eight judges and a deputy attorney general have resigned to protest Chaudhry’s suspension, which they say is unconstitutional.

According to Asma Jahangir, a founding member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and UN special rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights, the Pakistani people are outraged over what they regard as a trampling of their civil rights.

“The process that was adopted to remove [Chaudhry] was not only illegal but politically it was very repressive as well, so people have been shaken up,” she says. “They feel that if the chief justice of Pakistan can be dragged through the streets in this manner — and humiliated and dismissed in that unceremonious way — [then] nobody is safe at the hands of the repression of this government.”

source=http://www.azadiradio.org/en/news/2007/03/8FEE1FB1-F2A3-4026-BF30-B89734770998.ASP

Topics: Pakistan News |