LAHORE – Lahore High Court (LHC) Chief Justice (CJ) Ijaz Ahmed Chaudhry has proposed 24 new names from lawyers and districts and session judges (D&SJ) to the Judicial Commission of Pakistan (JCP) for appointment as additional/ad-hoc judges in the Lahore High Court (LHC), sources told Pakistan Today.
According to sources, the proposed list includes names of 18 lawyers and six D&SJs including LHC Registrar Abdul Sattar Asghar and a former LHC registrar. According to sources, intelligence agencies have also been asked to provide confidential reports about religious and political affiliations of the “would be judges” at the earliest so that in the next meeting of the JCP, the matter of their appointments might be finalised.
The six D&SJs proposed for appointment as LHC judges include Abdul Sattar Asghar, former LHC registrar Tahir Pervez, Lahore D&SJ Abdul Waheed Khan, Accountability Judge Subha Sadiq, LHC OSD Javed Nawaz and Malik Izharul Haq. Nawaz is an OSD since long after he was dismissed and restored by the LHC. Names of lawyers have been chosen carefully from the pro-judiciary Hamid Khan Group, pro-government Friends Alliance Group of Federal Law Minister Senator Dr Babar Awan and the People’s Lawyers’ Forum (PLF) to avoid criticism from any quarters.
Lawyers’ name include PPP-backed Lahore High Court Bar Association (LHCBA) presidential candidate Rai Bashir Ahmed, LHCBA President Abdus Quddus, Zafar Iqbal advocate, Ziaullah Khan Manj advocate, Shahzad Shaukat advocate, Farooq Amjad Mir advocate and Mehmoodur Rashid advocate. According to sources, law officers from office of the Punjab advocate general and the attorney general are also included in the list including Deputy Attorney General Naveed Inayat Malik, Punjab Additional Advocate General Shujaat Ali Khan, Asmatullah advocate from Rawalpindi and three lawyers each from Multan, Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan.
The 24 names have been forwarded to Supreme Court (SC) Registrar Dr Faqir Hussain, who is also the JCP secretary. Dr Faqir would put the names on agenda of the JCP and call its meeting to discuss appointments of the judges from the proposed list of the LHC CJ. The JCP has powers to reject some names but it is hoped that most of them would be appointed, as the LHC is facing an acute shortage of judges to hear both old and new cases.
Official sources told Pakistan Today that the LHC is overburdened by petitions of sensitive nature. They said that the LHC is lagging behind four years, as civil and criminal cases filed in 2004 are being heard now while new cases are being put on waiting, as their turn would come in 2014. The LHC has only 28 judges at the moment while the sanctioned strength is 60.
The shortage of senior judges is another dilemma for the court as out of the 28 judges, 20 are additional/ad-hoc judges while four senior ones, being PCO judges, are non-functional. Just four senior judges, including the CJ, are grappling with the huge backlog of cases including petitions. According to judges’ appointment procedure, the JCP would give recommendations on the proposals and send them to the Parliamentary Committee for final approval.
