Islamabad, Nov 5 (IANS) Pakistan may reduce the number of Supreme Court judges from 19 to as few as 10 as the present bench is “too big”, the country’s top law officer has said.
In an interview to Dawn, Attorney General Malik Mohammad Qayyum also brushed aside fears that military courts would be set up after the imposition of emergency, maintaining that “civilian rule” would continue to prevail.
He expressed the hope that the emergency proclaimed on Saturday would not last long and would be lifted in a month or two, adding that this depended on the improvement in the situation in the country.
President Pervez Musharraf had cited rising Islamist militancy and growing “judicial interference” in government functioning for imposing the emergency and promulgating a Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO) to enable him to amend the statute at will.
Musharraf also sacked chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and appointed judge Abdul Hameed Dogar in his place. The entire Supreme Court bench was dismissed and four new judges were appointed after taking oath under the PCO.
The new chief justice has cancelled the old cause list and issued a new one for a four-member bench comprising himself and judges Mohammad Nawaz Abbasi, Faqir Mohammad Khokhar and M. Javed Buttar.
“High-profile cases are missing from the list, including the acceptance of Gen. Musharraf as a presidential candidate by the Election Commission and the contempt of court case relating to the forced deportation of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif to Jeddah,” Dawn said Monday.
Speaking about the strength of judges in the apex court, the attorney general said the number was “too big”, adding that the workload on them was not justified.
The government was yet to take a view on the size of the Supreme Court bench but it could even be brought down to 10, Qayyum said.
About the emergency and the PCO, he said: “It is not martial law by any standard or a military rule, though you can call it emergency-plus.”
Admitting that the measures were extra-constitutional, he maintained these were on a lesser scale than what happened on Oct 12, 1999 when Musharraf overthrew Sharif in a bloodless coup.