By IANS
Islamabad : Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s attempt to put in place a pliant judiciary has suffered a jolt with three judges of a 10-member Supreme Court bench hearing petitions against the imposition of emergency saying they want to quit.
Judges Mohammad Nawaz Abbasi, Faqir Mohammad Khokhar and M. Javed Buttar said Friday that judicial propriety demanded that they detach themselves from the bench after Musharraf had cited some of their recent judgments to justify the emergency.
The judges said they would make their decision known when the hearing resumes Monday.
“Soon after the conclusion of Friday’s hearing, at a meeting held in the Supreme Court, the three judges expressed their inability to sit on the bench when the case would be taken up next week,” Dawn newspaper reported Saturday, quoting an informed source.
“Judicial propriety demands that I should not sit on the bench because repeated references have been made that the Supreme Judicial Council had been made ineffective and militants had been released on the orders of the apex court,” Khokhar observed at the fag end of Friday’s proceedings.
He and the two other judges were among those sworn in after the previous 19-member bench was sacked for refusing to take fresh oath under the Provisional Constitution Order (PCO) that Musharraf proclaimed along with the emergency Nov 3.
The bench is hearing petitions challenging the emergency, the PCO and the curbs imposed on the sacked judges, the electronic media and common citizens.
“Since I was a member of the bench which restored Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, now again deposed under the Provisional Constitution Order, I should rescue myself from the bench,” Khokhar maintained.
Abbasi said if his brother judge would not sit on the bench, neither would he and Buttar since they were part of the benches that had passed judgments that Musharraf had cited as reasons for imposing the emergency.
One of the reasons cited for the proclamation of emergency was that militants had been released on the orders of the Supreme Court, Abbasi said.
“But this is a misconception,” he said, adding that not a single instance was on record to prove that militants had been released on court orders.
According to Attorney General Malik Mohammad Qayyum, the bench was being over sensitive and suggested that it could say in its judgment that the failure of the judiciary could not be made a ground to justify the emergency.