Friday, November 23, 2007

UN demands reinstatement of Judges before vote

Pressure is mounting on Pakistan from all directions. First it was suspended from the Commonwealth earlier today, by a majority vote. Now the UN has called for Pakistan to release the Judges currently under house arrest, before it goes to polls.

Reuters reports:

Earlier in the day the Supreme Court, now stacked with judges friendly to Musharraf, threw out the last challenge to his October 6 re-election and paved the way for him to quit as army chief.

Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and a former prosecutor for international criminal tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda, said Pakistan faced a "terrible deficit in governance" without a free judiciary.

"It is not enough to move towards free and fair elections unless all the judges who were dismissed or suspended are fully reinstated in their previous capacity," she told reporters in Dublin.

"Otherwise we will have a very twisted form of democracy where the judicial branch will have been made totally subservient to the executive," she said on the sidelines of a human rights conference.

Despite the President's assertion on the contrary, with a second Commonwealth suspension in tow, it increasingly appears that, Pakistan is heading to the where we had started from in 1999.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Everybody is ready to jump on the train of UN. But I dont see any such response from UN in any other case. Let alone its capacity to upheld any of the security council resolutions.

This is a joke orchestrated by Western media and western capatilist countries and our people are riding the tides.

Anonymous said...

Pakistan is at a crossroad. We, as the people of Pakistan, can have a say in where Pakistan will go. We might not get a chance like this in many years to come. We have got to strike now. We NEED an independent judiciary. We need street protests to demand this. We have a chance to help this country be something better. Let's not let it go to waste.

Anonymous said...

Right now only Imran is calling for boycott of the polls, but the people have a power that they have not yet realised. Look how BB backed out of her deal with Musharraf when she saw the reaction of people to emergency. Now if we continue and make ourselves heard and demand free judiciary as a pre-condition to elections, we can force the major political parties to boycott elections. That would render Musharraf toothless.