Firing the chief justice sparks a crisis.

last updated 8 January 2015

Pakistan

Gen. Pervez Musharraf has launched “his second coup,” said Khalid Jawed Khan in the Karachi Dawn. Musharraf staged his first coup back in 1999, ousting the prime minister and installing himself as president. Now, in a blatantly unconstitutional act, he has put the chief justice under house arrest. “With this second coup, we are now in a class of our own.” Even Myanmar, with its long history of brutal martial law, “has not achieved this feat.” Musharraf has now effectively given up even the pretense that Pakistan is a nation ruled by law. Television screens around the world showed police hauling Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry away like a common criminal. The escapade is an international embarrassment.

Musharraf must have truly felt threatened, said Muhammad Zafar Khan Safdar in the Peshawar Frontier Post. Chaudhry seemed compliant enough when Musharraf appointed him in 2005. Since then, though, he has been “evolving in a way that comes as close to judicial activism as it gets in Pakistan.” First, Chaudhry ordered an investigation into the government’s dubious sell-off of Pakistan’s national steel company. Next, he earned the nickname “the people’s judge” by investigating the status of the “disappeared”—men picked up as suspected terrorists by the intelligence services and never heard from again. Yet it wasn’t as punishment for past rulings but to prevent future ones that Musharraf fired Chaudhry. One upcoming case questions the constitutionality of letting one person occupy the offices of both president and army chief, as Musharraf now does. Another will test whether Musharraf can be re-elected later this year by the same rubber-stamp parliament, or whether he must hold elections for a new parliament first.

Musharraf underestimated how angry the public would be at his heavy-handed treatment of Chaudhry, said Rahimullah Yusufzai in Islamabad’s The News. Most Pakistanis believe that Chaudhry’s suspension was politically motivated and unconstitutional. When the government tried to shut down media coverage of Chaudhry’s arrest and the protests that followed, the outrage only grew. Still, “it would be naïve to attach too much hope” to these demonstrations. “The power game in Pakistan is heavily stacked in favor of the all-powerful military.”