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Posts tagged with: Holbrooke
Jun 11, 2009    |       7 comments

Dorab Patel on Judicial Aloofness – CJP’s meeting Richard Holbrooke

Mr Shakil Jafri editor of The Financial Daily asked me to reproduce as an article what I had written on CJ meeting Richard Holbrooke. With the intention to expand on these few paragraphs I chanced upon some reflections of a past judge which I added to my statement and am reproducing it below.

Members of the Judiciary are supposed to stay aloof from social and political contacts. In this context let me quote from a speech delivered by Justice Dorab Patel at the Cornelius Society in Lahore in 1995. Justice Patel was a dissenting judge in the Bhutto case and had refused to take oath on General Zia’s PCO. He states that the judiciary in Pakistan inherited from the long line of judges, British and Indian, traditions of service, of learning and scholarship, of integrity, financial and intellectual, and of social aloofness.
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Jun 7, 2009    |       55 comments

CJP Iftikhar meets Holbrooke?

There is a news item which may go unnoticed that the Chief Justice of Pakistan had a meeting with Mr Richard Holbrooke in his chambers on Friday.

We as members of the civil society have struggled long and hard for his restoration and we continue to respect the Supreme Court, but for matters of dignity and norms the Chief Justice should not have met a political official of the US Government, which has been responsible for kidnappings and ‘externments’ from Pakistan to say the least. A large number of cases were heard by the Chief Justice himself before and are still pending in which the US government has clearly been accused and implicated. Even the issue of encroachment of Pakistan’s sovereignty, and drone attacks in violation of the same and of our basic rights, can come up for hearing at the Supreme Court.

A statement made out by the Registrar is a clumsy effort to cover up the issue when he said that ‘Matters relating to judicial reforms as per national judicial policy and the whole judicial structure of Pakistan were discussed‘.
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