Gas cylinders — File Photo

ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court stayed on Monday the award of a multi-billion-dollar contract for the import of 400 million cubic feet of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).

“Stay proceedings in all the forums till final decision of the case,” ordered a bench comprising Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, Justice Gulzar Ahmed and Justice Sheikh Azmat Saeed while hearing a suo motu notice on press reports that the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) has left the decision to award the contract to the cabinet.

The court summoned Waqar A. Malik, who has resigned as chairman of the Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) when its board was asked to declare Pakistan Gasport consortium as the lowest bidder, on March 18.

The court passed the injunctive order after Advocate Anwar Mansoor, representing the SSGC, assured it that the company would not process the matter to send it to the cabinet for approval.

Mr Mansoor explained that Waqar Malik’s resignation had more to do with the conflict of interest since he was also secretary to the board of Elengy Terminal Pakistan Limited a subsidiary of Engro group and one of the bidders in the LNG import.

Appearing on behalf of the Ministry of Petroleum, Advocate Salman Akram Raja assured the court that no contract would be awarded to any bidder since the apex court had taken cognizance of the matter.

However, both the counsel sought time to submit comprehensive comments on the subject.

The court noted that the two counsel had emphasised during the proceedings that transparency in the award of the contract was one of the major considerations.

But without commenting on the transparency aspect of the deal to any of the parties, prima facie, the court expressed its opinion that the ministries of petroleum and finance as well as the economic affairs division while adhering to an earlier judgment of the apex court could have followed a fair method in awarding the contract.

On April 28, 2010, the Supreme Court had directed the ECC to initiate “in a highly transparent fashion” the process afresh to award a contract to import LNG for the Pakistan Mashal project and short-term LNG supply project.

The court also ordered to repeat notices on all the bidding parties.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. — File photo/Online

ISLAMABAD: Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry has expressed concern over an alarmingly high rate of acquittal in terrorism cases and called upon the government to take measures for effective prosecution of such cases in all provinces.

He was presiding over a meeting on implementation of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997, on Saturday. The meeting urged the government to enforce Section 21 of the Act, which provides for the protection of judges, counsel, public prosecutors, witnesses and people concerned with court proceedings.

It drew attention to a case in Sindh in which six witnesses were murdered one after the other and expressed concern that if such negligence continued no one would come forward to record evidence.

Senior judges of the Supreme Court Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani, Justice Nasirul Mulk and Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali and monitoring judges of provincial high courts Justice Manzoor Ahmad Malik (Punjab), Justice Sajjad Ali Shah (Sindh), Justice Mian Fasih-ul-Mulk (Peshawar) and Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhail (Balochistan), SC registrar, home secretaries, IGPs, additional IGPs, secretaries prosecution and prosecutors general of all provinces and IG Islamabad attended the meeting.

The meeting noted that according to a report compiled by the prosecution department of Punjab government, the large rate of acquittal was on account of various factors, in particular, defective and dishonest investigation and weaknesses in prosecution.

It observed that the respective provincial government must address such defects and deficiencies immediately and impart necessary training to investigators and prosecutors and provide requisite equipment, including forensic lab.

The meeting noted that investigation should be carefully carried out so that innocent persons did not have to suffer the ordeal of investigation or trial and necessary material and all requisite witnesses were produced so that the guilty could be convicted and punished.

The IGPs made presentations regarding the causes of delay which are mostly due to defects in registration of cases, non-availability of eyewitnesses, no description of accused, role of accused not specified, material evidence not mentioned, delay in FIR registration, defects in investigation, defects in identification parade and doubtful recovery, etc.

The chief justice said the major reason for non achieving desired results was non-implementation of certain provisions of the Anti Terrorism Act. Not only that adequate protection had not been made available to presiding officers of the trial courts and investigators, but no protection whatsoever was available to the witnesses.

The witnesses usually avoid coming forward to depose against the culprits, especially in the cases of terrorism and sectarian killing. Thus, the matter of safety and protection of witnesses is very important and needs to be tackled on a priority basis. If there is no sufficient evidence, it is not possible for the court to inflict punishment without determining the guilt of the person. Nobody can be deprived of his life and liberty without due course of law.

He said backlog of cases in anti-terrorism courts in some places was partly because of delay in appointment of judges. Therefore, the issue of shortage of Judges must remain under constant focus.

He said the apex court had issued certain guidelines to be observed by the ATCs and related agencies like prosecution and investigation departments. The guidelines provided for a monitoring mechanism of functioning of these courts. Four judges of the Supreme Court and one for each province monitor the ATCs’ performance. The chief justices of high courts have also designated one judge each for the functioning of these courts.

The meeting agreed that initially two anti-terrorism courts, along with necessary infrastructure, staff and prosecutors, may be established in Islamabad because being a capital territory it has good number of anti-terrorism cases.At presently, the anti-terrorism cases of Islamabad are being heard at Rawalpindi ATCs.

It proposed that meetings of stakeholders in each province under the chairmanship of monitoring judges of the respective high courts be convened as soon as possible to formulate strategies and to resolve issues.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. — File photo/Online

ISLAMABAD: Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry on Thursday stressed the need for devising a workable mechanism on the basis of high ideals of democracy for the sake of peace and harmony in the country.

“Pakistan is passing through a critical phase in its history where daily events of kidnapping for ransom, target killing, forced disappearances, energy crisis, corruption and nepotism have crippled the socio-economic development and have shattered the confidence of the public in the state functionaries,” he observed.

The chief justice was speaking at a full court reference in the Supreme Court to bid farewell to Justice Tariq Parvez on his attaining the age of superannuation.

“It is the need of the hour that authorities should work hard to rescue the democratic set-up from being distorted in the backdrop of the social evils we are facing,” the chief justice remarked.

He, however, was confident that state institutions and the civil society would join hands for achieving the common goal of transforming Pakistan into a genuine welfare state by following principles of rule of law, fairness, accountability, transparency and supremacy of the Constitution.

The chief justice clarified that the role of judiciary was not to oppose other organs of state. Rather, it was to merely check the arbitrary exercise of power by any institution or functionary of the government or executive.

The purpose of the law was to offer solutions to social problems, not opportunities to create manipulations, he said. Its sole legitimate goal is to serve the people, the society and the state.

Referring to the absence of government functionaries such as law minister and attorney general and any representative of the Pakistan Bar Council from the recent meetings of the Judicial Commission (JC) on the appointment of judges, he said the non-participation by such members deprived the commission of valuable input in selecting the best and brightest for the benches. Therefore, he added, all stakeholders were expected to fulfil their constitutional obligation in the public interest. One
vacancy already exists in the Supreme Court against which nomination has been made. Another position has become available with the retirement of Justice Tariq Parvez.

High courts throughout the country are facing severe shortage of judges where additional appointments are needed to complete the strength of the benches.

The chief justice said the process of appointment of suitable candidates must be expedited to deliver the fruit of “sure administration of justice” to the general public. Low strength of judges in the superior and subordinate judiciary ultimately caused great discomfort and inconvenience to litigants, he said.

According to him, members of the bar are saddled with the responsibility of making substantial contribution to the process of judicial reforms, particularly in the context of making access to justice for all a reality.

Earlier, Attorney General Irfan Qadir requested the chief justice and other judges to consider revisiting some past judgments, like the judgment of July 31, 2009.

ISLAMABAD: Believe it or not, convicts, mentally deranged persons and government servants can still contest election to the office of the president without fear of being disqualified.

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) amended the rule governing the presidential election on Sept 10, 2007, to take away the provision for disqualification of presidential candidates — less than a month before the polls comfortably won by the then military ruler, Gen Pervez Musharraf. Key opposition leaders Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were in exile in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia respectively.

The amendment in the presidential election rules, which is still in force, was kept a guarded secret by the ECP until it was disclosed by the then minister for parliamentary affairs, Dr Sher Afgan.

Under the defunct section 5(3)(a) of the presidential election rules, the returning officer was empowered to conduct a summary inquiry and reject any nomination paper on satisfaction that the candidate concerned was disqualified under the Constitution to be elected as president. The section was simply struck off.

The justification for the abrupt amendment was that it was meant to bring the rule in conformity with two judgments of the Supreme Court passed in 2002 and 2005.
Interestingly, incumbent Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry was a member of both the benches.

The justification, however, did not satisfy many who believed that if the change in the rules in light of the judgments was at all required why the ECP kept sleeping over it for years and came out with it weeks before the election to explicitly favour Gen Musharraf.

Chief Election Commissioner Justice (retd) Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim said he could not offer any comment because he would have to go through the record to see as to what had been done in 2007. “This seems to be something very important, but I do not know the exact position at the moment,” he remarked.

An eight-member bench of the Supreme Court, headed by then Chief Justice Sheikh Riaz Ahmad, and comprising Justice Munir A. Sheikh, Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, Justice Qazi Mohammad Farooq, Justice Mohammad Ajmal, Justice Deedar Hussain Shah, Justice Hamid Ali Mirza, Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar and Justice Mohammad Nawaz Abbasi on a petition filed by Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the former chief of Jamaat-i-Islami, challenging the referendum order of April 27, 2002, that disqualification clauses listed under Article 63 of the Constitution were not applicable to the president’s election.

“The disqualifications listed in Article 63 cannot be read into Article 41(2) in view of the judgments of this court in Aftab Shabaan Mirani v president of Pakistan (1988 SCMR 1863) which upheld the judgment of the Lahore High Court in the case reported as Mohammad Rafiq Tarar v Justice Mukhtar Ahmad Junejo (PLD 1998 Lahore 414). The same view was also expressed in Mohammad Shahbaz Sharif v Muhammad Altaf Hussain (PLD 1995 Lahore 541,” the judgment reads.

On a petition filed by the Pakistan Lawyers Forum, a five-member bench of the Supreme Court headed by the then Chief Justice Nazim Hussain Siddiqui and comprising Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, Justice Javed Iqbal, Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar and Justice Faqir Mohammad Khokhar rejected as untenable the argument that Chief of the Army Staff could not have assumed the office of the president because of the definition of the “services of Pakistan” in Article 260 of the Constitution and the disqualifications in respect of such persons contained in Article 63, holding that these had no application to the president.

“The provisions of Article 63 (1) (d) have been made applicable to the continuation in office of the President after Dec 31, 2004, by virtue of the proviso to clause (7) of Article 41, which was inserted by 17th Amendment. Any other clause or paragraph of Article 63 of course does not apply to the president since it is a settled law that the president is only required to be qualified to be a member of parliament (as provided by Article 62) and is consequently not hit by the disqualifications contained in Article 63 of the Constitution. The argument of the petitioners that the president is subject to all the disqualifications contained in Article 63 of the Constitution ignores the settled law on this point as discussed and upheld most recently in Qazi Hussain Ahmad’s case,” the court observed.

Supreme Court of Pakistan. — AFP photo/File

ISLAMABAD: Setting Jan 28 as the date for the next hearing in the case pertaining to the controversial memo alleged to have been sent by Pakistan’s former ambassador to the US, Husain Haqqani, the Supreme Court issued notices to all those party in it,  DawnNews reported on Monday.

A nine-member larger bench of the apex court, headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, will resume the hearing of the case pertaining to the memo sent to former US military chief Admiral Mike Mullen seeking US intervention to avert a possible overthrow of the government by the military.

The Supreme Court issued notices to Haqqani, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Ministry of Defence.

In its latest order, the court once again directed security officials to devise arrangements for the former ambassador’s security and subsequently inform the Supreme Court registrar on those.

The Supreme Court had previously ordered for Haqqani’s security concerns to be addressed.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.—File Photo

KARACHI: Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry on Saturday said that the Karachi law and order case has been conducted according to the constitution and the principles of justice, DawnNews reported.

Speaking to lawyers in Karachi about the situation of law and order, the Chief Justice said that their effort was to quell the unrest in the city by addressing the root causes of the issue.

Now that the verdict has been issued in the case, he said that it is up to the other institutions how they implement the courts order.

“The situation would have been better if the order had been implemented properly,” said Justice Chaudhry.

He added that if free and fair elections are held, then the law and order condition would improve.

Moreover, the CJ added that all institutions were working according to their roles set in the constitution. “The future is bright wherever the judiciary is independent and the people have access to their rights,” he said.

Chaudhry said that it would be better if the lawyers refrained from taking the extreme step of going on strike, since delay in the dispensation of justice would cause disillusionment among the people.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan.—AFP Photo

ISLAMABAD: Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry suggested on Monday that the local government elections could be helpful in checking the menace of extremism in society because it provided people-to-people contact at the grassroots level.

“One of the reasons behind growing extremism and dacoities in the neighbourhoods is that we have lost interaction with the people at the ward and union level,” the chief justice observed, adding that the country’s founding fathers had deliberately incorporated constitutional provisions for holding local bodies’ elections.

The observation was made when a three-judge bench took up a petition filed in 2009 by Rab Nawaz from Quetta.

The petitioner has sought justification from the authorities for violating the Constitution by not holding local government elections in cantonment areas for the past 14 years.

“When you talk of democracy then you have to hold the local government elections even in the cantonment areas,” the chief justice observed and noted with concern that the last such elections were held in Oct 1998.

Deputy Attorney General Dil Mohammad Alizai, representing the federal government, informed the court that the defence ministry would soon submit a summary for approval of the prime minister to hold local government elections in cantonment areas.

He conceded that the affairs of cantonment boards were being run by nominated administrators.

He told the court that the government was ready to hold local bodies elections the moment the Election Commission of Pakistan announced the election date.

The Director Legal, Ministry of Defence, Commander Shahbaz, told the court that the summary would positively be moved on Monday from his department for the approval of the prime minister.

The chief justice observed that the prime minister was a very efficient functionary and recalled that the local bodies’ polls were always held during military regimes, though no such elections were held in the cantonment boards.

Pointing towards the defence ministry’s representative, the chief justice observed that provisions of the Constitution could not be denied and that they should be supportive in strengthening democratic institutions.

Local governments are an effective institution because local representatives are always close and within reach of the common people. They also help settle issues at the grassroots level, reducing despondency among the masses.

The court, however, adjourned the hearing till Dec 17 on the request of the defence ministry and the deputy attorney general so that they could seek instructions from the government.

SINDH LB ORDINANCE: The same bench put off proceedings in a petition against the Sindh Local Government Act, 2012, till Dec 17.

Through his petition, Barrister Zamir Hussain Ghumro of the Sindh Bachayo Committee has challenged the controversial law, which was adopted by the Sindh Assembly two months ago.

The petitioner pleaded before the court to declare the Act as illegal, unconstitutional and unlawful since dozens of its sections, wholly or partially, were in clear conflict with Articles 2, 5, 9, 25, 97, 129, 130, 137, 142 and 175 of the Constitution.

Mr Ghumro has requested the court to declare that towns could not be created outside the boundaries of revenue divisions, no new police districts could be created on the basis of towns in metropolitan corporations and provincial subjects and executive authority of other departments under Schedule-1 could not be transferred to the department of local government or any local body.

Lawyers opined that rather than banning shows, culprits should be dealt accordingly with the law.— File Photo

ISLAMABAD: Lawyers of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) and the Pakistan Bar Council (PBC) endorsed the Human Rights Watch’s concerns over the Supreme Court’s actions perceived to restrain the media, a local daily newspaper reported on Friday.

The representatives of the superior bars were of the view that the judiciary should learn from the criticism in the media and in case of a crime is committed in this regards, rather than issuing restraining orders the culprits should be dealt according to the law.

Leaders of the lawyer bodies also believed that the media should be independent and free from restrictions and that it had the right to regulate itself on sensitive issues and the judiciary should not interfere in the matter.

On the other a leading senior analyst belonging to a local news group opined that the HRW should have checked and verified the petitions filed in the courts with regards to the contempt of court, before accusing the apex court of muzzling the media. Najam Sethi said that the HRW action was uncalled for as the court had issued notices only in case of personal attacks and not for the criticism of the judicial verdict’s

The international human rights organisation based in the US had voiced its concern over use of “contempt of court powers” by the judges in Pakistan to stop criticism of judiciary in the media.

There has been a rise in the case pertaining to the media in the courts.

The court issued notices to a local tv news channel owner pertaining to Malik Riaz’s interview broadcasted and to Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) over Senator Faisal Raza Abidi’s outbursts against the chief justice broadcasted on local TV channels.

A view of the National Assembly. — File photo

ISLAMABAD: The National Assembly is likely to take up and approve on Monday a bill which will validate actions taken by former prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani between his conviction on April 26 and sacking on June 19 by the Supreme Court in the contempt of court case.

According to the order of the day issued by the National Assembly on Sunday, Minister for Law and Justice Farooq H. Naek will table the bill to “validate acts, orders and other instruments etc, done, made and issued from 26-04-2012 to 19-06-2012 (both days inclusive)”. ‘The Validation Bill, 2012’, as reported by the standing committee on law, will be taken up by the house at once.

Mr Gilani was convicted in the NRO implementation case and handed down a symbolic punishment — till the rising of the court. Because the court’s short order was not clear whether the prime minister had lost office, Mr Gilani acted as prime minister till June 19.

Then a three member-bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry sacked Mr Gilani on the basis of the April 26 short order which wasn’t challenged by the government.

Instead of filing a review petition against the conviction, the government sought National Assembly Speaker Dr Fehmida Mirza’s ruling in favour of Mr Gilani which she gave on May 24. She ruled that following Mr Gilani’s conviction there was no need to send a reference to the Election Commission for his disqualification.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry struck down the speaker’s ruling and asked the president to take necessary action to fill the position of the prime minister.

Soon after Mr Gilani’s removal, questions were raised over the legal status of actions taken by him as prime minister between April 26 and June 19.

On June 24, President Asif Ali Zardari issued ‘Validation Ordinance, 2012, to protect all acts of Mr Gilani as prime minister between April 26 and June 19 and restrained the courts, including the Supreme Court, from challenging them.

On July 9, the ordinance was presented before the National Assembly in the form of a bill and the standing committee on law and justice unanimously approved it on Sept 25.

Under the 18th Amendment, the president cannot re-promulgate an ordinance that has to be presented before either house of parliament within 120 days.Former federal minister for law and justice Khalid Ranjha said it was necessary for the certainty of the law. Moreover, he said, the court in its detailed order had asked the government to take necessary action to provide legal cover to the former prime minister’s actions taken during the intervening period.