Judges who faced charges and those penalised

LAHORE: LAHORE: The quite recent alleged audio tapes involving former Pakistani chief justice Saqib Nisar and former Punjab governor-turned-PTI lawyer Khàwaja Tariq Rahim have raised many questions on judicial state of affairs in Pakistan.

The alleged telephonic talk between the mother-in-law of Pakistan’s top judge and Khawaja Tariq Rahim’s spouse surfaced a few days ago. It is still talk of the town and eyebrow-raising, and goes on to show how families of top judges can affect and influence pivotal decisions, being made at country’s highest court at crucial and history-changing junctures.

A decade or so ago, similar audio leaks involving a sitting judge Malik Qayyum and the-then NAB chief Saifur Rehman had also ignited a heated debate on how verdicts against ex-premier Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Zardari were manipulated by those at helm.

And then Justice Malik Qayyum’s audio with the current premier Shehbaz Sharif had also ignited a controversy, but neither has anybody ever been held accountable in the past, nor are there any signs or chances of Justice Saqib Nisar being brought to justice.

A peek through global judicial history reveals that while a good number of court judges have generally been deemed to be above the law and accused of behaving with impunity in absence of tough consequences, the long arm of law did manage to clutch a few of these ‘Law Lords’.

Judicial misconduct has thus not just affected many human lives, but it has also taken a few.For example, a few years ago, former Pakistani chief justice Nasim Hasan Shah had admitted in a television programme that the execution of an ex-Pakistani premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a judicial murder.

Justice Shah had confessed that the verdict for Bhutto’s execution was given under duress. He was part of the seven-member bench of the Supreme Court that had upheld Bhutto’s death penalty.

And it was a rare occasion in Pakistan’s judicial history that a petition against a former apex court chief justice was filed, whereby the plaintiff had sought registration of a case against him on the charges of abetting in the ‘murder’ of Premier Bhutto.

However, a division bench comprising Justices Sheikh Abdur Rashid and Bilal Khan held that the petition hardly qualified for processing because the judge of a bench could not be proceeded against in a case that had already been decided.

On February 25, 2010, this is what the-then president Asif Zardari was quoted as saying in Quetta: “I believe former justice Naseem Hasan Shah as the murderer of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.”

Justice Naseem died a natural death in 2015 without being questioned or called to stand in the dock. In the US, state and local judges have repeatedly escaped public accountability for misdeeds that have victimised thousands.

British news agency Reuters states: “Nine of 10 arbiters kept their jobs, an investigation found – including an Alabama judge who unlawfully jailed hundreds of poor people, many of them black, over traffic fines.”

In its June 30, 2020 report, this eminent media house revealed that approximately 1,700 federal judges hear 400,000 cases annually in United States, and almost 30,000 state, county and municipal court judges handle a far bigger docket: more than 100 million new cases each year, from traffic to divorce to murder.

In November 2002, three judges of Karnataka High Court (India), with two female advocates, got involved with a women guest at a resort.

The police arrived but there was no action taken. Judges were Veerabhadraiah, Gopalagowda and Chandrashekariah. Status of the case was- 3 judge enquiry committee appointed by the Chief Justice of India filed its report and clean chit was given.

In September 2010, the former law minister Shanti Bhushan created a sensation in the Supreme Court when he moved an application terming eight former chief justices of India corrupt and dared the court to send him to jail for committing contempt of court.

Now, let us review a few cases where judges had to pay for misdeeds or judicial misconduct.

In the US, the only Supreme Court justice to be successfully impeached was Samuel Chase in 1804. He was charged with arbitrary and oppressive conduct during trials. However, the US Senate acquitted him.

Overall, in American history, some 15 federal judges have been impeached, and eight removed from office; others resigned in the wake of scandal instead.

In June 2022, Tunisia’s president, Kais Saied, sacked 57 judges, accusing them of corruption and protecting terrorists in a purge of the judiciary.

In Pakistan, during 2023, Peshawar High Court had dismissed a district and sessions judge, Asghar Shah, in corruption charges, and had also ordered recovery of over Rs15 million from him.

In 2020, an accountability judge Arshad Malik was sacked by Lahore High Court after his video had gone viral, whereby he was heard confessing that he had convicted Nawaz Sharif under duress.

Arshad Malik was heard admitting he was in a compromising position after being sedated. His video was released by Maryam Nawaz.

In 2012, judge Masood Bilal of Khanewal had resigned after a video showing him dancing with a girl at a party was uploaded on YouTube. The-then Lahore High Court registrar said the court had initiated proceedings even before the judge had resigned.

In India, Justice Chinnaswamy Karnan, was sentenced to six-month imprisonment by the Indian Supreme Court in May 2017 on contempt charges. He was the first Indian High Court judge to be sent to prison for contempt while in office.

Justice Soumitra Sen of the Calcutta High Court had to resign in 2011 after the Rajya Sabha (Senate) had passed an impeachment motion against him. He was the first judge to have been impeached by the Upper House for misappropriation of public funds (Indian Rs33,22,800) that he had received in his capacity as receiver appointed by the Calcutta high court.

Amidst charges of corruption, land-grab, and abuse of judicial office, Justice Dinakaran, the chief justice of the Sikkim High Court, had resigned in July 2011—fearing impeachment.

In the UK, Justice Jonah Barrington was removed from office as a judge of the Irish High Court of Admiralty in 1830 for corruption. He had misappropriated funds due to the litigants.

The newspaper had stated: “The judge was detained in south-west London by officers from Kent police and later released on bail pending further inquiries. She has been suspended from the judiciary.”

In the UK, one of Britain’s first black female judges, Constance Briscoe, was jailed In May 2014 on three counts of doing an act tending to pervert the course of justice in R v Huhne and Pryce.[2] She was disbarred and removed from the judiciary.

In November 2021, as Al-Jazeera had reported, Bangladesh’s former chief justice, Surendra Kumar Sinha, was sentenced in absentia to 11 years in jail for corruption in a case that opposition groups and supporters say is politically motivated.

Justice Sinha had headed the Bangladesh Supreme Court, when it ruled in 2017 that parliament could not sack judges, a move hailed by lawyers as safeguarding judicial independence.