By Ann W. Parks

Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, the 20th chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court, speaks at Georgetown Law November 24.

Students pack Room 206 of McDonough Hall to hear Chaudhry’s remarks.

An independent judiciary — as defined by Black’s Law Dictionary — means one that “is not subject to the control or influence of another.” And on November 24, students got a glimpse of what judicial independence truly means as they welcomed Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, the 20th chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court, to Georgetown Law.

Chaudhry, who became chief justice of his nation’s highest court in 2005, took on a government which, he said, failed to live up to the ideals of that country’s constitution. 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 to his job once more and to restore an independent judiciary in his country. When the judges were arrested last year, angry Pakistani lawyers — many of whom have been educated in the West — demonstrated in the streets.

“His actions sparked a movement in Pakistan by lawyers — lawyers that many of us saw risking their lives,” said Law Center Dean Alex Aleinikoff 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, 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.”

Zero tolerance

Not content with mere talk, Chaudhry gave the dean copies of some of his decisions, so that lawyers and students could decide for themselves whether his conclusions were just (copies of the decisions can be found here). A short film, called “Breaking the Silence,” told the story of the custom of swara, which was criminalized by the Pakistani Supreme Court in 2004. A landmark judgment by the court in 2005 further ordered local police to protect women against the practice.

“His court had zero tolerance for environmental degradation, corruption, terrorism [and] human rights violations,” Minallah said of Chaudhry, adding that in the 62 years of Pakistan, the executive branch was not used to this kind of independent court. “On the ninth of March 2007, he was asked by a man in uniform to tender his resignation…his ‘no’ became a symbol for the struggle for rule of law.”

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.

 

A Webcast is available here.