HRCP calls for end to confrontation between state organs
LAHORE: Commenting on the Supreme Court verdict in the contempt case against the prime minister, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has called for an end to confrontation between the state organs.
The HRCP believed that, while it was gratifying to note that the Supreme Court had held its hand while sentencing the PM, nobody could be happy that matters had come to the point that the head of an elected government was convicted of and sentenced for contempt of court, and that the court could not avoid making its decision controversial.
The commission observed that the situation resulting from the maximal and rigid positions taken by the two essential pillars of the state – the executive and the judiciary – could only be regretted. The executive earned no credit by apparently defying the apex court’s orders, which must be accepted even when they did not seem to be correct or sound, and only time would tell what cause had been promoted by the judiciary by belabouring the executive, out of the hundreds of issues on which it was liable to be chastised, on the issue of its own contempt. ‘The tendency to treat what is legally permissible as mandatory needs to be reviewed and greater reliance placed on the principle that all institutions must work not only within their constitutional limits but also adopt policies and postures that strengthen each other.”
“Unfortunately, the matter between the state institutions does not look like ending soon. It is hardly necessary to point out that Pakistan needs both justice and democracy in ample measure and that justice without democracy will be as inadequate a dispensation as democracy without justice. The people who have been kept on tenterhooks for week after week only wish to see the end of a confrontation that is looking more and more ungainly. They must not be disappointed.”
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