‘Chief justice has agreed to meet lawyers’

Complete strike if demands not met, DBA presidents say.

MULTAN:

“Chief Justice Tassuduq Hussain Jillani has invited the district bar association presidents to Islamabad on December 23 to discuss the issue of establishment of Lahore High Court (LHC) benches in five divisions of the Punjab,” Sahiwal District Bar Association president Malik Muhammad Hussain said on Tuesday.

He was speaking at a convention of more than 800 lawyers from Dera Ghazi Khan, Sahiwal, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Sargodha who got together in Multan on Tuesday to press their demands of setting up LHC benches in their divisions.

Hussain said they had received a letter from the chief justice of Pakistan saying that their “demands would be met.”

Hussain said the lawyers would continue the strike for three days a week.

“We will continue to boycott legal prosecution until we meet the CJ.”

Faisalabad District Bar Association President Mian Javed told The Express Tribune that lawyers had earlier united in Islamabad to raise the issue before former chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chahudhry but the demonstration “was crushed and lawyers were beaten up by police.”

Dera Ghazi Khan Bar Association President Arif Khan Gurmani said the lawyers would completely boycott legal activities in the divisions if their demands were not met by December 31.

“We have complete support of district bars and sub-district bars as well as the high court bars in the divisions,” he said.

The lawyers raised slogans against former chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 18^th, 2013.