A manifestly ill-intentioned legal saga has come to a close in a historic turnaround. In a 6-4 majority decision, the Supreme Court on Monday accepted all the review petitions, except one filed by Justice Qazi Faez Isa himself, against its verdict on June 19, 2020, in the presidential reference against the judge.
\nSpecifically, the petitions concerned the bizarre directions in the earlier judgement \u2014 which had otherwise quashed the reference as being \u201ctainted\u201d \u2014 ordering the FBR to conduct an inquiry into offshore properties owned by Justice Isa\u2019s wife. Those directions have now been \u201crecalled and set aside\u201d, and all steps taken in response to them declared \u201cillegal and without any legal effect\u201d. For the Supreme Court to review its decisions is rare, and it is rarer still when a 10-member bench had passed the original decision. The significance of this development cannot be overstated. It is far more than a resounding victory for the apex court judge: it is a triumph of the rule of law and constitutionalism when they seemed to be on increasingly shaky ground.
\nJudicial reviews are usually sedate proceedings where only points of law regarding the original verdict are discussed. In this case however, the bench undertook a broader examination of the case, going back to the impetus behind the presidential reference itself. Over the course of the proceedings, a sharp divide among the superior judiciary became evident, most notably when the judges differed over the amount of time allowed the government lawyer to present his arguments. While dissent among judges helps in shaping the law and adding nuance to judgements, such a division can also suggest deeper tensions at play. Allowing one of their brother judges to be unjustly persecuted would have left the judiciary as a whole vulnerable; that the majority opinion was converted into a minority one indicates that this view \u2014 and perhaps conscience \u2014 prevailed in the end.
\nThe verdict also serves as an object lesson for those who tried to pervert the law and the concept of accountability to malign and excise from the bench a judge unafraid to call them out for their excesses. One need only glance through the Faizabad sit-in judgement to understand the genesis of the presidential reference. For the government, clearly willing to go any distance required to stay on \u2018one page\u2019 \u2014 even to the extent of risking a schism within the highest court in the land \u2014 the denouement is an unalloyed debacle, leaving behind a stain it will find difficult to wash away. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A manifestly ill-intentioned legal saga has come to a close in a historic turnaround. In a 6-4 majority decision, the Supreme Court on Monday accepted all the review petitions, except one filed by Justice Qazi Faez Isa himself, against its verdict on June 19, 2020, in the presidential reference against the judge. Specifically, the petitions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-editorial"],"yoast_head":"\n