Mian Saqib Nisar has sworn is as the 25th Chief Justice of Pakistan on Saturday (today).
Earlier, President Mamnoon Hussain approved the appointment of Justice Mian Saqib Nisar as the new chief justice of Pakistan.
Justice Nisar has replaced Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali who retired on Friday after serving as chief justice for 15 months since his appointment in September 2015.
The oath-taking ceremony was held at Supreme Court of Pakistan.In April this year, Justice Nisar served as the acting CJP in the absence of Chief Justice Jamali who had gone to Turkey on a seven-day official visit.
In April this year, Justice Nisar served as the acting CJP in the absence of Chief Justice Jamali who had gone to Turkey on a seven-day official visit.
Justice Nisar has been a judge of the apex court since Feb 18, 2010. Before that, he was a judge of the Lahore High Court (LHC).
Before being appointed as a judge, he was a member of the Supreme Court Bar Association and Lahore High Court Bar Association (LHCBA). He was elected as secretary general of the LHCBA in 1991.
Born on Jan 18, 1954, in Lahore, Justice Nisar did his matriculation from the Cathedral High School, Lahore, graduation from the Government College, Lahore, and bachelor of law from the University of Punjab in 1979-80.
He joined the legal profession as an advocate on May 2, 1980. He was enrolled as an advocate of the high court in 1982 and advocate of the Supreme Court in 1994.
He was elevated as the judge of the high court on May 22, 1998, and of the Supreme Court on Feb 18, 2010.
Justice Nisar specialised in civil, commercial, tax and constitutional laws and appeared in a large number of important constitutional cases both in the LHC and the Supreme Court.
He was appointed as the federal law secretary on March 29, 1997, when he became the first member of the bar to be appointed to the important position.
Justice Nisar represented Pakistan at an international conference held at the Wilton Park, United Kingdom, on the subject of “Pakistan and India at Fifty”.
He led a Pakistani delegation to a conference in Manila on the subject of “Asia Region Transitional Crimes”. He also attended conferences in Switzerland and Norway.
He had also been a part-time lecturer at the Punjab Law College and Pakistan College of Law, where he taught civil procedure code and the Constitution.
His first challenge as the new CJP will be a composition of the larger bench that will hear the Panamagate case.
The SC in November took up a slew of petitions seeking PM Nawaz Sharif’s disqualification in the wake of Panama Papers, which in April revealed that the PM’s family members had stashed money in offshore companies.
The outgoing Chief Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali, who was also heading the bench and conducted 10 hearings of the case, adjourned the case till the first week of January. His retirement on December 30 dissolved the current bench.
Justice Nisar, who will remain the top judge of the country for more than two years, will reconstitute the bench with many options available to him.
He can replace the outgoing CJP by sitting himself on the bench or hand over the command of the new bench to Justice Asif Saeed Khosa, who will be the senior most judge, once Justice Nisar assumes office.