An unhappy standoff is in the offing between the Supreme Court and Parliament. What lies at the core of the conflict is the issue of whether the Judicial Commission (JC) or the bipartisan eight-member Parliamentary Committee for the appointment of judges (PC) is the final authority in the appointments of the superior judiciary. A four member bench of the apex court had in a short order last week overturned the PCs decision rejecting one-year extensions to six nominees of the JC for reappointment as additional judges of the provincial high courts. The bench had ordered the government to issue the notifications for their extension. The committee now insists on the validity of the reasons it had given in support of its rejection on grounds of merit and wants a full bench to take them into consideration.
The legal community is divided over the issue. The PC maintains it has relied on the evaluation by the respective chief justices. A section of the lawyers argue that the PC is constitutionally empowered to accept or reject the recommendations of the JC. Some of them altogether reject ad-hocism in judiciary. As President SCBA Asma Jahangir put it on Wednesday, ad-hocism was altogether unacceptable. She also insisted that merit must prevail. While the PC had conveyed the grounds on which it had decided to reject the nominations, the SC bench has issued only a brief order. Thus reasons for the courts verdict are yet to be recorded. This has led Asma Jahangir to express concern and insist that constitutional requirements should be fulfilled in order to avoid creating distance between institutions. Another section of the lawyers, however, argues that the JC has primacy over the decisions of the PC.
The Parliamentary Committee wants the Prime Minister to file a review petition in the Supreme Court on behalf of the federation. But will the matter be settled there? The standoff raises disturbing questions that might finally be referred to Parliament. Did the Parliament give the final authority to accept or reject a judge to the JC or PC? Has the PC virtually no role other than countersigning the recommendations of the JC? Is that what the Parliament really intended? Above all, are the sitting judges alone to decide who should or should not be a judge? A war over the turf between an elected parliament and an independent judiciary is the last thing the country can afford, burdened as it is with serious issues from a deteriorating economy to a spreading terrorist wave.
