Package a 'death blow' to judiciary: Allah Nawaz

LAHORE - Former Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court Mian Allah Nawaz has disapproved of the changes proposed for the judiciary in the Constitutional package and has termed the same as a ‘total death blow to the concept of an independent judiciary.’

The ex-CJ in threadbare examination of the proposed Constitutional provisions relating to the judiciary has viewed through his 43-page note, that the proposed method of appointment of judges as well as their retention in the judiciary would wholly become contingent upon sweet-will of the political parties.

Against the backdrop of historical developments on political, judicial and economic plains showing their bearing on the Constitutional system of the country, Mian Allah Nawaz on the proposed method of appointment of the judges through a Commission chaired by the Chief Justice of Pakistan and comprising five chief justices of provincial and federal High Court and the Commission being chaired by the Federal Law Minister in case of appointment of the CJP, says, it demolishes the original scheme of the judges appointment giving a participatory role to the majority political party in the process to the extent of annihilating the Constitution of 1973 and nullifying the SC verdicts in Al-Jehad and Asad cases.

Under the proposed scheme, the Commission will forward two names to the prime minister for filling in one vacancy of the judges and he would in turn send for confirmation one name to the Joint Parliamentary Committee, comprising the nominees of the Treasury and the Opposition benches. He said this appears to be a strategy to divide the vacancies among the political parties according to their proportional strength. He says the composition of the Committee has been set in a way that it was to become a battleground between the political parties over the ‘spoils.’