ISLAMABAD: Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Qazi Faez Isa on Friday claimed he was a more senior journalist than those doing court reporting and to substantiate his claim, he cited several articles he authored, including those published in this newspaper.

According to the CJP, after the Supreme Court judgement on March 6, regarding a presidential reference in which the apex court declared the trial of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as unfair, a Christian foreigner said to him, “Can you revisit that decision (trial of Jesus Christ) also”.

In his article ‘Trial of Jesus Christ, The Negation of Justice’ published in 2001, CJP Isa tried to establish how a number of instances suggested the negation of justice to Jesus Christ by the Sanhedrin court.

“The Pakistani courts can do anything,” came a remark by a journalist attending the swearing-in ceremony organised to administer the oath to the newly elected body of journalists covering the Supreme Court called the Press Association of the Supreme Court (PAS).

The ceremony was also attended by Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhail, Justice Athar Minallah, Justice Naeem Akhtar Afghan, and Attorney General for Pakistan Mansoor Usman Awan.

Justice Isa, other judges attend oath-taking ceremony of association of SC reporters

“I will take this remark in good humour rather than a criticism,” the CJP observed, adding, “We should always hurry in doing good deeds.”

He also recalled how he cited a judgement from the House of Lords on a shipping matter to convince his colleague as the chief justice of the Balochistan High Court (BHC) to write short sentences in a convincing manner.

In that judgement, a very short sentence was used to encompass a complete picture like “The ship sailed”.

The CJP then cited a book called “First You Write a Sentence” by Joe Moran, stating he benefited greatly from the book by learning how to write. “There is a lesson in the book not only for the journalists or lawyers but also for the judges,” he said.

“There is no virtue in volume and no virtue in bulk,” the CJP said and then recalled how the Lahore High Court judgement on the murder conviction of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ran in 627 paragraphs, whereas the March 1979 majority judgement of the Supreme Court had spread over 963 paragraphs.

“I have never come across such a heavy judgement in our criminal jurisprudence,” he said, adding maybe there was no equal in the civil law jurisprudence also.

He said every citizen even lawyers had their view on this judgement, but whenever “you ask someone have you ever read the judgement”, the reply has come in negative.

The CJP also showed journalists copies of Daily Dawn in which he had written a number of articles, like the one he wrote on December 25 1987, about “Quaid at the Bar”, as well as “Rascality of the British”.

In addition, he also wrote a book called “Mass Media Laws and Regulations,” which was published by Asia Media Information Centre in 1997 with a commentary by Javed Jabbar.

The CJP cited a number of instances of how witty the founding father Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah was and said even his mother Syeda Qazi Isa wrote an article titled: “Christening of Jinnah”.

Published in Dawn, June 15th, 2024