SC decision against Nawaz controversial: The Economist

LAHORE: “Who would swap a lion for a pick-up truck? That is the switch of logo imposed on candidates chosen by the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz [PML-N] in tomorrow’s Senate elections,” says The Economist.

“The election commission forced the party’s candidates to run as ‘independents’ after a Supreme Court verdict barred Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister, from chairing the party following a corruption scandal,” it added.

Party bigwigs fear ‘independents’ might be bullied into switching allegiance before entering the 104-seat upper house. The traditional establishment, which loathes Sharif, appeared to have a hand in reshuffling a provincial assembly to hurt the PML-N’s chances. The top court’s ruling against Mr Sharif, voiding every action he took as party leader, was also controversial, The Economist said.

About the significance of Senate elections, it said, “Control of the Senate hinges on small margins: the PML-N falls short by just one seat. If it can cobble together a majority, Mr Sharif might have a chance of undoing the law underpinning his dismissal as prime minister.”

On the other hand, an article published in The New York Times says Chief Justice Saqib Nisar, is a man on a mission, with issues like clean air, clean water, pure milk, fighting against hepatitis and cancer, and for a fair price for crops on his to-do list.

“Nisar has said one reason Pakistan isn’t a superpower is that Pakistani gardeners take way more smoking breaks than their Chinese counterparts. He has also said the judiciary is like a village elder, and that its integrity should not be doubted,” it says.

“Village elders go a bit batty occasionally, but we can’t say that about the chief justice because it would amount to a serious crime called contempt of court. There is already a former senator in jail for committing this crime, and two ministers may soon join him. (All three men are from the governing Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, or PML-N) And so Nisar goes around exhorting fellow judges, lawyers and citizens at large to do their work not ‘just as a job’, but with passion.”

“In July 2017, the Supreme Court invoked corruption charges to remove Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from office. With passion. And last week a panel headed by Nisar passionately disqualified Sharif from heading the PML-N, also invalidating his selection of candidates to run on the party’s ticket in Senate elections scheduled for March 3,” comments the writer.

“It is often said that judges shouldn’t speak, that only their decisions for the court should. But Pakistan’s senior judges don’t just want to do justice, they want to be seen and heard doing it. In his opinion in a corruption case against Sharif, part of a scandal broadly known as Panamagate, Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khosa quoted Mario Puzo quoting Balzac in ‘The Godfather’: ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime’. He called the mafia novel’s epigraph ‘fascinating’ before saying that the current case revolved around the same notion,” says the article.

“Other judges so love the sound of their own voices that they run the superior courts like talk shows. The Supreme Court’s agenda increasingly seems to be set by what’s on television. Major news stories have spurred the court to start proceedings suo motu, or on its own authority. The hearings that follow then feed the news cycle again, with the justices making headline-worthy comments and cracking jokes. Last year, one of them told the attorney general that the government was like ‘the Sicilian mafia’,” the NYT adds.

But judges who play saviours are a dangerous thing in this country. When an general takes over in Pakistan the first thing he does is ask judges to take their oath of office again; they usually oblige. Then they interpret the Constitution to justify a dictator’s claim to power.

“If they can’t find a basis for that in the law books, they invent it. The Supreme Court famously created “the doctrine of necessity” in 1954 to justify Pakistan’s first application of martial law. Its logic basically was: The general has an army under his command, so what do you expect us judges to do?”

The article says, “Musharraf has said publicly that in a number of suits against him the army ran interference to get the courts to grant him bail. Although accused of abrogating the Constitution, Musharraf is allowed to live in comfortable exile and, unlike Sharif, he has never been prevented from heading his own party.”

“No wonder Sharif reacted with sarcasm to the Supreme Court’s recent decision to remove his name as the PML-N’s leader, goading the justices to search the law for a reason to “snatch” his own name from him as well. All decisions of the Supreme Court are Nawaz Sharif-specific,’ he said.”

In the concluding paragraph, the writer says, “He [Nawaz] has a point. Nisar wants passion from the bench, but passion is partisan, and we’d all be better off if Pakistani judges went back to treating their work as just a job, and to quoting law books instead of ‘The Godfather’.”