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Pakistan apex court takes government to task

Nirupama Subramanian

ISLAMABAD: In a day of dramatic developments in the Pakistan Supreme Court, the full court hearing Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary’s petititon challenging the filing of a presidential reference against him ordered personnel of the country’s intelligence agencies to keep out of the courts, issued a contempt notice to a senior official of the Law Ministry for trying to “scandalise” the court and barred an advocate for his role in this.

In an angry order, the court also asked the Director-General of the Intelligence Bureau to sweep the Supreme Court clean of all bugging devices from the courtrooms, from the judges chambers and from their homes, and file an affidavit by next week swearing this had been done.

The court’s order came after lawyers for Chief Justice Chaudhary drew the attention of the judges to material appended to the reference containing the charges against him.

The material, apparently not sourced to anyone, alluded to some members of the superior judiciary in abusive language.

It also contained pictures taken inside the suspended Chief Justice’s home, that his lawyers said were “intrusive of his privacy.”

Included in the order is a notice for contempt of court to the Secretary, Ministry of Law and Justice, for placing before the court unsigned documents emanating from “unidentifiable and irresponsible sources” containing “naked abuses” aimed at “scandalising this court and maligning some of its judges.”

The judges were even more incensed when the Attorney-General and lawyers representing the government claimed ignorance of the evidence appended to the reference, and said they had forwarded what had been given to them by the Law Ministry.

“Now we know your intention,” Justice Khalilur Rehamn Ramday, who heads the bench, told counsel for the government Malik Qayyum. “You want to scandalise and malign the court and the judges. We will deal with it and will not let it go un-noticed or unpunished.”

After Mr. Qayyum made an unreserved apology and pleaded ignorance, the buck finally stopped at the advocate-on-record for the government, a lawyer who assists counsel in administrative matters. Saying that “even the meanest of the mean litigants avoid such things,” the judges cancelled his licence to practise and served him too with a contempt notice.

The full court barred the intelligence agencies from seeking records from the courts and said in the order that it would hold the court registrar responsible for non-compliance of the order.

The judges also imposed a fine of Rs. 100,000 on the government and directed that it be given for flood relief work in Balochistan province.

The government had submitted all the material relating to the reference to the Supreme Court last week after telling the full court that it had no objection if the same 13 judges conducted the hearing of the reference instead of the Supreme Judicial Council.

This was an apparent retreat by the government, but the Supreme Court said it would make up its mind whether or not to take up the reference only after coming to a decision on the petition of the Chief Justice.

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