CHIEF JUSTICE IFTIKHAR CHAUDHRY AND EXTENSIVE REVIEW
The person who would become most deeply associated with carrying forward the jurisprudential innovations of the 1990s was also a direct and immediate beneficiary of General Musharraf’s seizure of power.
When the first PCO was announced in early 2000, 6 of the 13 judges of the Supreme Court declined to take oath upon it and were subsequently retired from service. The Chief Justice of the time, Saeeduzuman Siddiqi, was amongst them. Shortly after, new appointments were made and Iftikhar Chaudhry, only months after being promoted to the position of Chief Justice of the Balochistan High Court, was amongst the appointees. Not immediately spurning the benefits conferred, he also thereafter signed his name to judgments that ‘validated the military takeover by Gen Musharraf, his referendum, his legal framework order (LFO) and the 17th constitutional amendment that gave the president additional powers and allowed him to continue as the army chief.’[353] He proceeded quickly in terms of seniority through the denuded bench to become Pakistan’s youngest ever Chief Justice in 2005.In a turnaround from this early record, Chaudhry was reborn as an activist judge upon becoming Chief Justice. Early in his tenure, a human rights cell was set up at the Supreme Court. A novel innovation, ‘it receives applications relating to human rights violations either through post, fax, telegram, email or through use of court box available in the Supreme Court or on the basis of print and electronic media reports’.[354] A staff of intermediaries then prepares fact sheets on the basis of which the court can initiate suo moto cases. The process
Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and Extensive Review 137 enabled over 6,000 human rights cases until the year 2007 to be decided for affected parties without, often, the expenses involved in retaining counsel themselves.[355]
Such cases received regular publicity in the national media and made the person of the Chief Justice as well as the institution of the Supreme Court increasingly popular amongst a broad swathe of Pakistani society. The Supreme Court frequently targeted situations in which the local political elites were implicated.
These included the recovery of kidnap victims in which politicians had been involved. Additionally, cases of police brutality, as well as of violence against women, were taken up.[356]In addition to these human rights cases, the court began to elaborate a doctrine of ‘transparency’, whereby executive action was to be tested against procedural criteria derived from broader administrative law principles.[357] By early 2007, the court had rolled back the privatisation of the Pakistan Steel Mills under such scrutiny and also incurred some official wrath for daring to call in high officials of the security establishment in its pursuit of missing persons petitions.[358]
However, as the following section indicates, there was only a brief moment of what seemed to be unanimous public support for the activism that was associated with the Chaudhry court. In turn, even Chaudhry in his later years as Chief Justice and certainly those who have followed him in office have been more circumspect in the use of suo moto powers and in employing some of the other innovations of public interest litigation. Thereafter the redressal of individual rights violations was tied somewhat to reinvigorating all levels of the judicial structure to become forums where these issues could be tried. The National Judicial Policy of 2009, authored by Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry counseled reforms through to the lowest levels of the judiciary to close off possibilities of political capture and corruption.[359] Additionally, those operating the human rights cell were instructed to redirect individual petitions back to the district and sessions court level
and thereby lessen the burden upon the Supreme Court to exercise its original suo moto jurisdiction.
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