- An ordeal not yet over
The decision by the Pakistan Bar Council to go for a review petition against the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Mr Justice Qazi Faez Isa may appear an odd one, as the Council had apparently won the case, in that the short order had quashed the notice of the Supreme Judicial Council to Mr Justice Isa. However, the review petition illustrates an important truth: that the short order’s direction that the Federal Board of Revenue submit a report of the wife and children of Mr Justice Isa to the Supreme Judicial Council registar, who is also the Supreme Court registrar, continues Mr Justice Isa’s ordeal. While the direction may have been made because the Supreme Court wanted to show that members of the superior judiciary were not beyond the reach of accountability, there still seems no plausible reason for the Supreme Court to have ordered a report from the FBR to the SJC about proceedings involving someone not a member of the superior judiciary.
The final result of the order will be that the case will not achieve finality until the SJC considers the report. Mr Justice Isa will thus continue to suffer the mental agony and distress he has since the proceedings were started. The failure of the short order to pinpoint the reasons for this wanton exercise of state power have ensured that those very government organizations which stand accused of persecuting him in the name of accountability, will continue to have the ability to do so. The enquiry into Mr Justice Isa’s family’s properties abroad was only opened after he authored the judgment in the Faizabad sit-in case, in which certain institutions were criticized.
Another thing the order has stayed silent about, and which has raised curiosity, is that the questions raised during the hearing about the legality of the Assets Recovery Unit, and of its head, Accountability SAPM Shehzad Akbar, have not been addressed. The relevance was that the ARU was the body that raised the allegations against Justice Isa and, while it has been left free to act, its credibility has also been put into a kind of limbo. Judicial independence is not supposed to mean freedom from accountability, but nor should it mean being a perpetual target.
