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KARACHI, Dec 6: Senior lawyer Muneer A. Malik, a former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association, believes that there is no chance of free and fair elections being held without an independent judiciary.
Mr Malik was taken into custody after the Nov 3 imposition of emergency rule in the country and fell severely ill during his period of detention. Talking to Dawn at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT), where he has been admitted for some time, the ailing lawyer said that the transition of power from military to civilian rule was not possible in the absence of an independent judiciary.
“There is no doubt about the fact that the coming elections [scheduled for Jan 8] will be engineered or doctored,” he said from his hospital bed. “The establishment will prefer a hung parliament so that there is no possibility of a two-thirds majority and nobody will touch Article 58(2)b.”
The 58-year-old lawyer said that the primary goal of the lawyers’ movement was the restoration of the judiciary to its pre-Nov 3 status. “I will be very disappointed if the restoration of the judges sacked in wake of the Provisional Constitution Order [2007] does not become the foremost and non-negotiable demand of every major political party that considers itself a democratic political party,” he observed.
Urging the country’s political parties to demand the restoration of all the members of the judiciary, headed by the deposed chief justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, Mr Malik asserted that “we must go back to the morning of Nov 3 to save the state’s institutions from collapse.”
“Even if certain political compulsions make it necessary for political parties to participate in the elections, at the very least these parties could present the restoration of the judiciary as a non-negotiable demand,” he said. “Notwithstanding the eventual fulfilment of this demand, the political parties should commit that there will be no indemnity for the extra-constitutional act of Nov 3.”
‘Siege mentality’
Asked how the pre-Nov 3 judiciary could be restored, Mr Malik said that this could be done easily. “All the president has to do is to say that the PCO is retroactively recalled,” he pointed out, adding that he was at a loss to understand why the establishment found Mr Chaudhry unacceptable while others were perfectly acceptable. “Mr Chaudhry is not a vindictive man,” said Mr Malik. “He never sat in any case involving President Musharraf.”
In reply to another question, the now bed-ridden lawyer said that there was no process of reconciliation between the establishment and the country’s political parties. “The establishment is suffering from a siege mentality,” he opined. “They think that if they yield to this demand, the floodgates would be opened and they don’t know what may happen to them then.” He added that though this nation gained independence 60 years ago, it had still not got liberty.
Mr Malik, who has undergone dialyses four times since his admission into SIUT, told Dawn that his time in police custody “was a terrible ordeal.” He said that he was kept in a cell measuring 6x8 feet. “This was the most difficult time — I was kept in solitary confinement for three consecutive days,” he related. He was deprived of even a pen and paper for 23 days in police custody.
“I did not suffer physical injuries as such but the psychological treatment meted out, plus the medical treatment I did or did not receive after my complaints were perhaps among the factors that contributed to my illness,” he said. And while he said that members of the jail staff were “very nice” to him, he added that “they were being watched by the ISI men. However, all this has only increased my commitment to the rule of law and the supremacy of the constitution.”
