Justice Mazhar Iqbal Sidhu, a sitting judge of the Lahore High Court (LHC) resigned from his office on Tuesday, days before he was scheduled to appear in the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) on March 2 for a corruption reference which was pending in the council against him.
According to Justice Sidhu’s hand-written resignation available with Pakistan Today, he resigned due to personal reasons, but resigning means that the former justice no longer has to attend the hearing and answer for his alleged misconduct.
Earlier, a show cause notice was issued to him regarding the corruption reference. Sidhu and four other judges faced misconduct proceedings initiated by the council last month. According to the sources, the five judges include three judges of the LHC and two of the Islamabad High Court.
A senior lawyer told this scribe that resignations from the four remaining judges are expected over the next two months. If they resign before the charges against them are proven before the council, as Justice Sidhu has done, they can expect full pensions and all other associated perks for life.
Justice Sidhu became the judge of the LHC in February 2010 and was supposed to retire in February 2023. The strength of LHC judges dropped to 59 after Sidhu tendered his resignation to the President of Pakistan. He was the 10th most senior LHC judge and would have become the Chief Justice of the LHC on September 1, 2022, for six months if the incumbent Chief Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah had been elevated to the Supreme Court by then.
Born in 1961, Justice Sidhu, son of Ch Muhammad Ramzan, received his early education from Government Liaqat Memorial High School, Sheikhupura and stood first in his graduation exam from Government College, Sheikhupura, in 1983. Justice Sidhu started his legal practice from Sheikhupura’s district courts after getting his law degree from the University of the Punjab in 1985. In 1988, he became an advocate of High Court and received his Supreme Court license in 2002. Justice Sidhu was elected as the President of the Sheikhupura District Bar Association in 2004 and he was an expert in dealing with criminal cases as a lawyer. In 2010, he was declared to be an expert of law of evidence by the Asian Development Bank.
Justice Sidhu was also in news some years ago after the LHC summoned Lahore’s chief traffic officer for not providing the judge with the required security protocol when he went to have his driving license renewed in March 2014.
