Lawyers coming together in support of Justice Isa

PBC summons lawyers convention on June 9-10 to consider presidential reference

ISLAMABAD: Superior bars have been active to express full solidarity with the Supreme Court judge Qazi Faez Isa who is facing a presidential reference over his alleged misconduct as lawyers, who played active role in 2007 movement for restoration of judges, are also coming together to fight a legal battle.

A numbers of senior lawyers – Munir A Malik, Aitzaz Ahsan, Ali Ahmad Kurd, Rasheed A Rizvi, Tariq Mahmood, Khalid Javed Khan and Faisal Siddiqi – have started consultations with each other to support Justice Isa.

A lawyer, who is close to the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI) legal wizard Hamid Khan, has said despite Hamid Khan’s party association he will fully back the SC judge in the present crisis.

Khan, who is currently out of town, is leading the Independent Lawyers Group, which resisted General Pervez Musharraf’s Legal Framework Order (LFO) and Nov 3, 2007 emergency. Former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry has also started contacting senior lawyers for garnering support for the SC judge.

It will be interesting whether Attorney General for Pakistan (AGP) Anwar Mansoor Khan will appear as prosecutor before the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC), which is the forum to hear the presidential reference.  A senior government official said the AGP will himself prosecute in this case.

However, he admitted that it will be awkward for the additional attorney generals, who represent the federation in Supreme Court, to appear before the SJC against an apex court judge.

Earlier, former Lahore High Court (LHC) judge Anwarul Haq was engaged to plead the case in former judge Shaukat Aziz Siddiqi case during tenure of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government but he was not paid.

It is learnt that all material, which is being submitted in the SJC, has been vetted by Ministry of Law, which got services of a former SC judge, who took oath under Musharraf’s Provincial Constitutional Order (PCO) to prepare the reference.

The Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) former president Yasin Azad, who is a leading member of Asma Jahangir Group, has demanded that both Law Minister Dr Farogh Naseem and AGP Anwar Mansoor Khan should be resigned as they are responsible for sending this reference

“Both of them are counsels for [General Musharraf,” he added. The Pakistan Bar Council has also summoned a lawyers’ convention on June 9-10 to consider the situation.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Law has said it is bound to act upon complaints it receives from the Asset Recovery Unit and the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) in the best interest of the country. The ministry on its own has no mechanism to look into the assets of any judge, it said in statement issued on Friday.

“The Ministry of Law and Justice and the law minister believes in upholding the rule of law and will continue to do so,” said the statement, which came after a section of press lambasted Law Minister Farogh Naseem from for initiating the case against Justice Qazi Faez Isa.

“No changes in the language of the reference were made by the Law Ministry on the instructions of the President,” the statement added in reference to reports carried by a section of press that ministry had deliberately used harsh language in the reference and that the president had to modify the language.

“There is no truth to the reports regarding changes made in the language of the reference since no such directions were issued by the Aiwan-e-Sadar in this regard and no language was changed. [The report is] factually incorrect’ and a figment of relevant journalist’s imagination,” it said.