A Supreme Court hearing into allegations of misrule by former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf resumed yesterday without any lawyers present to defend the former army chief, who left for London two months ago.
Last week, a 14-member bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry ordered Musharraf to answer charges that he had violated the Constitution by ousting the judiciary and imposing emergency rule in November, 2007 in a desperate move to extend his rule.
Fighting a Taliban insurgency in the northwest, dire economic challenges and doubts about its own standards of governance, Pakistan’s fragile civilian government can ill-afford the distraction of raking over the past, critics said.
Others say leaders should be held accountable if democratic institutions are to grow, and future generals should be made to think twice before launching coups against civilian governments.
The army, which stepped back from politics after Musharraf’s ouster, would be loathe to be dragged into the controversy, but generals, after backing Musharraf’s actions in 2007, would not want to see their old chief humiliated, analysts said.
Opening proceedings yesterday, Chaudhry received no response when asked who was present to represent Musharraf.
“We haven’t received any notice so far and once we get it then we will decide whether to appear before the court or not,” Saif Ali Khan, a member of Musharraf’s legal team, told Reuters by telephone from London.
Musharraf, who came to power in a military coup in 1999, had previously voiced both his intention to defend himself and his expectation of a fair hearing from a court headed by the judge who became his nemesis.
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
RSS