[DAWN] IN the public discourse, Chief Justice Jawwad S. Khawaja, who retires on Sept 9, has been generally understood as being an extension of the judicial thinking of former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. But such an assessment fails to fully recognise Chief Justice Khawaja's distinctive judicial role and contribution as a Supreme Court judge and then chief justice of the Supreme Court.
The "momentousness of what has transpired in this country since 2007" has been repeatedly recognised by him in his various judgements. But very few people go through the personal transformation which the chief justice (a Lahore High Court judge at the time) went through in March 2007. He was the first and only superior court judge to resign in protest against the suspension of chief justice Chaudhry by Gen Musharraf and was content to spend the rest of his life as a stoic Sufi in intellectual contemplation. But his appointment as a Supreme Court judge in 2009, marked the beginning of a remarkable Supreme Court judicial career, guided by judicial creativity and in his own words (when he quotes justice Bhagwati), a duty "to transform the status quo ante into a new human order".
If there is one single concept which captures the Supreme Court career of Chief Justice Khawaja, it is the mission to de-colonise judicial thinking. As he himself stated, "It is about time, 65 years after independence, that we unchain ourselves from the shackles of obsequious intellectual servility to colonial paradigms and start adhering to our own peoples' Constitution as the basis of decision-making on constitutional issues." In other words, to think about and find solutions to our problems in terms of our own historical and contemporary facts, with a people-centric constitutionalism. |