Dear friends,
We wish to share with you the following statement from the Information Press
Asian Human Rights Commission
Hong Kong
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A Statement from Information Press forwarded by the Asian Human Rights Commission
PAKISTAN: Replace the Ruling Tyranny of Pakistan with Real Civilian Democracy
By AITZAZ AHSAN
Date: 23 December 2007
(InformPress.com) – The Chief Justice of Pakistans Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, and his family have been illegally detained in their house, barricaded in with barbed wire and surrounded by police officers in riot gear since 3 November 2007. Phone lines have been cut and jammers have been installed all around the house to disable cellphones. And the United States doesnt seem to care about any of that.
The Chief Justice of Pakistan is not the only person who has been unlawfully detained. All of his colleagues who – having sworn to protect, uphold and defend the Constitution – refused to take a new oath prescribed by Pervez Musharraf as Chief of the Army, remain confined to their homes with their family members. The Chief Justices lawyers are also in illegal detention, initially in such medieval conditions that two of them were hospitalized, one with renal failure.
As the Chief Justices lead counsel, I, too, was held without charge – first in illegal solitary confinement for three weeks and subsequently under unlawful house arrest. Last Thursday morning, I was released to celebrate the Eid holidays. But that evening, driving to Islamabad to say prayers at Faisal Mosque, my family and I were surrounded at a rest stop by policemen with guns cocked. I was dragged off and thrown into the back of a police van. After a long and harrowing drive along back roads, I was returned home and to illegal house arrest.
Every day, thousands of lawyers and members of the civil society striving for a liberal, progressive and tolerant society in Pakistan demonstrate on the streets. They are bludgeoned by the Mush regimes brutal police and paramilitary units. Yet they come out again the next day.
People in the United States wonder why extremist militants in Pakistan are winning. What they should ask is why does Musharraf have so little respect for civil society – and why does he essentially have the backing of American officials?
The White House and U.S. State Department briefings on Pakistan ignore the illegal removal of the justices and all these unlawful detentions. Meanwhile, lawyers, bar associations and institutes of law around the world have taken note of this brave movement for due process and constitutionalism. They have displayed their solidarity for the lawyers of Pakistan. These include, in the United States alone, the American Bar Association (ABA), state and local bars stretching from New York and New Jersey to Louisiana, Ohio and California, and citadels of legal education like Harvard and Yale law schools.
The illegally detained Chief Justice of Pakistan continues to receive enormous recognition and acknowledgment. Harvard Law School has conferred on him its highest award, placing him on the same pedestal as Nelson Mandela and the legal team that argued Brown v. Board of Education. The National Law Journal has anointed him its lawyer of the year. The New York City Bar Association has admitted him as a rare honorary member. Despite all this, the Musharraf regime shows no sign of relenting.
But for how long? How long can the Chief Justice of Pakistan and his colleagues be kept in illegal confinement? How long can the leaders of the lawyers movement be unlawfully detained? They will all be out one day. And they will neither be silent nor still.
They will recount the brutal treatment meted out to them for seeking the establishment of a tolerant, democratic, liberal, progressive and plural political system in Pakistan. They will state how the writ of habeas corpus was denied to them by the arbitrary and unconstitutional firing of Supreme and High Court justices. They will spell out precisely how only one man (outlaw) set aside a Constitution under the pretext of an illegal Emergency, unlawfully arrested the judges, illegally packed the judiciary, unlawfully amended the Constitution by a personal decree and then illegally restored it to the acclaim of London and Washington.
They will, of course, speak then. But others are speaking now. The parliamentary elections scheduled for 8 January 2007 have already been rigged, they are saying. The Election Commission and caretaker cabinets are overtly partisan. The judiciary is entirely hand-picked. State resources are being spent on preselected candidates. There is a deafening uproar even though the independent news media in Pakistan are completely gagged. Can there even be an election in this environment?
Are they being heard? I am afraid not, but the ongoing freedom movement of lawyers, journalists, human rights defenders, students and civil society activists should continue until Pakistans ruling tyranny is replaced with real civilian democracy.
[Barrister-at-Law Aitzaz Ahsan – a former Minister, MNA and Senator – is an eminent human rights Advocate and the President of the Pakistan Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) based in Lahore, Pakistan.]
38 U.S. Senators Demand Freedom For Pakistani Advocate Aitzaz Ahsan
Website of Attorney-at-Law Aitzaz Ahsan
© Copyright: InformPress.com – 2007-2008
Author: Aitzaz Ahsan
Chief Editor: Syed Adeeb
Publisher: Information Press – USA
Publication Date: Sunday, 23 December 2007
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About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights issues in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984. The above statement has only been forwarded by the AHRC.
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