Recriminations overshadow key national issues, says CJP

KARACHI:

Political recriminations have caught the popular imagination of the people, encouraging them to endlessly play the blame game and in doing so forget their obligations and responsibilities, Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali said on Saturday.

In this state of affairs, he said, several crunch issues have been overshadowed. The chief justice’s made these observations at a seminar on judicial education in Karachi.



“There is no long-term planning and it is unfortunate that we cannot devise a unanimous strategy on basic and vital national issues,” he said.

The chief justice said that since the country’s Constitution guaranteed all citizens’ fundamental rights, laws could not be devised against this basic principle.

He observed that everyone kept talking about rights, but no one was willing to discharge their duties and fulfill obligations.  “Enforcement of laws is not the responsibility of just the judiciary, but the entire society,” he added.

Chief Justice Jamali said that the judiciary, executive and the legislature need to perform their responsibilities within their domains as specified in the Constitution. He said that all citizens “will have to perform their responsibility for (upholding the) rule of law and independence of the judiciary”. Declaring that enforcement of laws was the only way to improve society, the chief justice said that courts should plays their due role.

Underscoring the need for enforcement of Urdu as the national language, the CJ regretted that it was unfortunate that “we did not give (due) importance to our national language and it is necessary that judicial and legal system be enforced in national language because everywhere in the world legal education is taught in national languages”.



He said that there were some discrepancies in the current legal system, which needed to be resolved through long-term planning.

He appreciated that judicial officers for delivering judgments in the national language and expressed the hope that it would prove beneficial for legal education.


Published in The Express Tribune, May 8^th, 2016.