Judges purged by Pervez Musharraf to protect his disputed presidency will return to their posts “with dignity, respect and honor,” a leader of Pakistan’s new government said yesterday.
Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s forecast followed two days of talks aimed at settling differences within the ruling coalition over how to bring back the judges.
The issue is critical to the survival of Pakistan’s month-old civilian government, which has begun to ease the US-backed president’s military confrontation with militants.
It could also determine Musharraf’s ability to cling to his already diminished powers more than eight years after he ousted Sharif’s government in a coup.
Leaders of the two biggest parties in the coalition emerged from marathon negotiations in the Persian Gulf state of Dubai late on Thursday. Both sides insisted they had made progress on the judges issue and that the coalition would survive.
However, they announced no final accord and said Sharif would only disclose details of their discussions after a party meeting in Lahore yesterday.
“We have decided to restore the judges” through a resolution in parliament, Sharif told reporters on his arrival early yesterday at Lahore airport.
The justices will “go back to the courts with dignity, respect and honor,” he said.
Musharraf ousted some 60 senior judges — including Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry — when he imposed a state of emergency in November to stop legal challenges to his re-election.
But the crackdown only deepened his unpopularity, and his allies were routed in February parliamentary elections that propelled his opponents to power.
Sharif has pushed particularly hard for the reinstatement of the judges, stirring speculation that he sees them as an ally in a drive to oust Musharraf completely. The judges could re-examine complaints that Musharraf was ineligible for another five-year term.
But the party of assassinated ex-leader Benazir Bhutto, which leads the government, has sought to link their return to broader reforms that could crimp Chaudhry’s tenure and powers.
Chaudhry had shown an unusual degree of independence, investigating complaints that the country’s spy agencies were holding opposition activists secretly under the cover of fighting international terrorism. Musharraf accused the chief justice of corruption and of conspiring against him and his plans to guide Pakistan back to democracy.
Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto’s widower and political successor, has said that Chaudhry and other judges were “playing politics” and failed to deliver justice to him during the years he spent in jail on unproven corruption charges.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Japan’s northeast region late on Monday, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. A tsunami as high as three metres (10 feet) could hit Japan’s northeastern coast after an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.6 occurred offshore at 11:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued for the prefectures of Hokkaido, Aomori and Iwate, and a tsunami of 40cm had been observed at Aomori’s Mutsu Ogawara and Hokkaido’s Urakawa ports before midnight, JMA said. The epicentre of the quake was 80 km (50 miles) off the coast of
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away in the Argentine capital, the unmistakable sound of 2,397 dogs barking — and breaking the unofficial world record for the largest-ever gathering of golden retrievers. Excitement pulsed through Bosques de Palermo, a sprawling park in Buenos Aires, as golden retriever-owners from all over Argentina transformed the park’s grassy expanse into a sea of bright yellow fur. Dog owners of all ages, their clothes covered in dog hair and stained with slobber, plopped down on picnic blankets with their beloved goldens to take in the surreal sight of so many other, exceptionally similar-looking ones.
RSS