Law secretary replaced: Qadir in, Chishti out

New law secretary once questioned the restoration of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.

ISLAMABAD:

The government on Wednesday appointed as law secretary a former National Accountability Bureau (NAB) official who had once questioned the 2009 restoration of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and dozens of other judges of the superior judiciary.

The appointment of Irfan Qadir to the key slot came at a time when the Supreme Court’s (SC) hearing of the contempt case against Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani entered what appears to be the decisive phase.

Qadir, who was removed from the position of NAB prosecutor general in 2010 on the SC orders and then moved to the Presidency as a legal affairs consultant, had replaced Masood Chishti as the secretary of the Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs.

A brief official statement said that Gilani had appointed Qadir to the position and Chishti, who was handpicked by former law minister Babar Awan, was posted as a senior member of the Prime Minister’s Inspection Commission.

The statement did not give any reasons for the change. It seems, however, that the change is carrying veiled messages to both the SC as well as Senator Babar Awan, the vice president of Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) who refused to appear as a witness before the bench hearing contempt charges against Gilani.

Extreme defiance

It was Irfan Qadir who once pulled the trigger on a controversy in 2010 when he questioned the legality of an executive order by Gilani in March 2009 to restore Justice Chaudhry and over 50 fellow judges of higher judiciary who were sacked by former military ruler Pervez Musharraf under his emergency promulgation on November 3, 2007.

Though Gilani disowned Qadir’s ‘hostile’ letter to the SC at the time, dubbing it the opinion of an individual and not of the government, his appointment in the Presidency later raised many eyebrows.

There were suggestions among political and legal experts that Irfan’s letter then was actually a ‘veiled threat’ to the increasingly proactive judiciary hearing several challenges against the government and President Asif Ali Zardari.

By appointing him as law secretary, it looks as if the government has relayed the same message to the apex court again, that it was willing to go to any length to defy the top judiciary’s order to Gilani.

“The government (and) the premier have effectively given a message to the court that no letter will ever be dispatched from Islamabad to Switzerland,” said a senior lawyer, who requested anonymity.

Athar Minallah, another senior lawyer, said it makes no difference to the SC as to who holds which position. “The government can’t influence the court’s decision in the contempt case against Gilani through such moves,” said Minallah.

Out of favour

Another aspect of the appointment was the removal of Masood Chishti from the slot.

Picked by Babar Awan for the slot, Chishti had also refused to appear before the SC as a witness in the contempt case against Gilani.

The refusal by both Awan and his handpicked law secretary had infuriated Gilani and he expressed his anger for the pair at a ceremony in Islamabad a couple of weeks ago.

According to media reports, Babar Awan, once a close confidant of Zardari, had fallen out of favour with the president after his refusal to appear in the court in a case which was likely to cast shadow on the country’s future. At stake, among other things, is the future of the president himself.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 22^nd, 2012.