Georgetown Law Alumni Magazine - Res Ipsa Loquitur
Spring/Summer 2009 - Online Volume 1
Lectures and Events
A Standing Ovation for Judicial Independence
When Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry became the 20th chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court in 2005, he found a government that failed to live up to its constitution. So, among other things, Chaudhry reversed a privatization deal that had been approved by President Pervez Musharraf and forced the country’s intelligence agencies to acknowledge that it had held dozens of citizens in secret custody. For his actions, Chaudhry was suspended by his country’s president on March 9, 2007, and accused of misconduct. The Pakistani Supreme Court responded by reinstating him the following July. In November 2007, Musharraf declared martial law in Pakistan and placed Chaudhry and 60 other judges under house arrest. Chaudhry was confined for five months, during which time Musharraf replaced him with another chief justice.
Lawyers in Pakistan and around the world have supported Chaudhry in his quest to be reinstated. [And on March 16, 2009, following widespread protests, the Pakistani government announced it would restore the former chief justice.] “His actions sparked a movement in Pakistan by lawyers — lawyers that many of us saw risking their lives,” said Law Center Dean Alex Aleinikoff on November 24, as he introduced Chaudhry and Athar Minallah, a Pakistani lawyer supporting Chaudhry and other ousted judges. “It’s something that American lawyers and American law students have a hard time understanding.”
Greeted with a standing ovation by a packed house in one of the Law Center’s largest classrooms, Chaudhry said that while people are always interested in hearing his story, it should not detract from the real issues — upholding fundamental rights through public interest litigation and preserving judicial independence in the face of an overbearing executive. Believing that his country’s courts should be used to further the social and political progress of its citizens — and not simply to address private wrongs — Chaudhry and his court took on public interest cases that would be unimaginable in the West: one challenged the custom of swara, where young girls are given as compensation to a murder victim’s family; another involved employees who accepted exorbitant loans from their employers, consigning themselves to perpetual slavery.
“Is it fair that the government be allowed to flaunt the law with impunity merely because the victims are too poor, are too weak, are too unaware of their rights?” he said. “Public interest litigation has its greatest hope in developing countries, where large sections of the population are unable to approach the courts.”
The event was sponsored by the Georgetown Law Office of Transnational Programs, Office of the Dean of Students, Foreign Lawyers at Georgetown (FLAG), the Supreme Court Institute, the Sandra Day O’Connor Project on the State of the Judiciary and Crowell & Moring.
