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"Chief Justice of Pakistan minus Swat"
 When Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary walks into his office at the Supreme Court on Tuesday after a gap of 16 months, he has to contend with the troubling reality that his court has no writ in seven whole districts of the North West Frontier Province, including Swat.Last week, Sufi Mohammed, a hardline Islamist cleric and chief of the Tehreek-i-Nifas-i-Sharia Mohammadi, with whom the provincial government entered into an agreement in February to set up Sharia courts in the Malakand division of the NWFP in return for peace in Swat, ordered the regular courts in the region to stop functioning. Denouncing the courts as anti-Shari and anti-Islamic, the TNSM head asked judges and lawyers to stop going to work. In Swat district, Sufi Mohammed qazis have started holding court. "The qazi courts are taking up cases. The regular judiciary is paralysed, and the lawyers are all sitting home with nothing to do," a lawyer from Swat told The Hindu. He did not want to be named. More than 300 lawyers are registered with the Swat Bar Association, and lawyers' associations in other parts of the country have expressed concerns about the welfare of their colleagues in the troubled NWFP district. The irony is that Sufi Mohammed's order came on the same day that the government announced Mr. Chaudhary's restoration following a "long march" led by the former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, and lawyers demanding his restoration as basic to the "rule of law" in the country. It led to the comment by columnist Ejaz Haider in the Daily Times that unless the Swat situation was fixed, "the title Chief Justice of Pakistan would need a suffix in parenthesis -- sans Swat -- because the system Justice Chaudhary heads is not acceptable to Sufi Mohammed running his satrapy." Dawn newspaper reported that at least one "qazi court" has already pronounced a judgment in a civil case, directing the respondent to pay Rs.17,000 to the applicant, and a further Rs.20,000 in four instalments. Sufi Mohammed's son Rizwanullah Khan told journalists that the regular judges had taken a "wise decision" not to attend courts. "In Sharia, there is no room for courts functioning under English law," he said. Some lawyers had tried to persuade Sufi Mohammed to allow them to practice; but he rejected the appeal, telling them their profession was against Islam. Posted by: Fred 2009-03-24 |
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