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SZABIST seminar on judiciary turns into demo
KARACHI, March 20(Daily Times): The students of the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Technology
(SZABIST) staged a demonstration Monday to protest the current situation in the
country concerning the Supreme Court chief justice (CJ).
Former Sindh
governor Barrister Kamal Azfar said, "Pakistan is a state within the army and
not the army within the state. The more things change the more they remain the
same."
The protest took place with students and faculty members sporting
black armbands to indicate their absolute support for democracy.
Azfar
imparted, what many present considered, an inspirational speech. He said that he
was, in a way, a 'cheerful pessimist', and actually viewed this (referring to
the current issue) as a good time as the entire legal fraternity has come to the
aid of their chief justice. He felt that after 60 years in the making, Pakistan
had finally come of age and that now there was solid ground for a democratic
nation.
Addressing the law students, he spoke about the historical
constitutional background of the country, "where there have been three decades
of democratic rule and another three of military rule".
"Pakistan is a
product of democracy created from the votes of the Muslim majority of the
sub-continent." He said that Muslims then lived in a time of "doom and gloom and
a sense of failure" and yet, he felt, the country's people have now come a long
way.
Azfar detailed accounts of past Common Law rulings regarding the
current matter of the military taking precedence over the Constitution and
referred to the Pakistan Law Digests (PLD) for the benefit of the law students.
The former governor also criticized the law minister.
He spoke to his
audience about the time of Khwaja Nazimudin and Ghulam Muhammad, saying:
"History repeated itself in the time of Jamali and Musharraf." He elaborated on
the royal prerogative and the separation of powers in the legislative,
parliamentary and executive bodies of the nation and gave a detailed explanation
of the much-talked-about rule of law.
He said that people were correct to
question whether this issue is a conspiracy as there was no emergency for the
president to have made such a call, especially with regards to the senior-most
member of the Supreme Judicial Council, saying that Rana Bhagwandas was not in
the country and he iterated the opinion that the letter published by Naeem
Bukhari, which was contradicted by most of the parties mentioned in it, was also
a media scam to destabilise the public's support for the CJ.
He
requested that the public continue to support the chief justice because there
would be, as he put it, "a lot of 'dhama dham mast qalander' because the chief
justice will not resign."
After his address, he was presented a shield by
Senator Dr Javed Leghari.
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| Education News | | Updated: 25 May, 2012 |
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