Despite talking all the time about the supremacy of the Constitution, some judges of the apex court have consistently violated it. Starting with Chief Justice Munir (who first used the doctrine of necessity to act in favor of an illegal act) to the present Chief Justice Bandial, these judges have bent over backward to support dictators. But the decision yesterday to remove Hamza Shahbaz as chief minister of Punjab proves that our judges are shameless and their actions will damage the country.
To put matters in perspective, let's take a look at what these three judges have done. First, they ruled that those Imran Khan's party members who voted for Hamza should be de-seated and their votes should not be counted. Nowhere in a democratic country is this done. Even in UK, Boris Johnson's fellow Conservatives voted against him, their votes were upheld and they were not de-seated. This same three member bench had ruled that fresh bye-elections should be held to elect25 new provincial assembly members and Hamza should be elected by the new assembly.
In the new election, the head of the PML-Q party (Ch. Shujaat) asked the deputy speaker conducting the election to ignore the votes of ten members of his party if they voted for Imran Khan's candidate (Parvez Elahi, who has been called a "dakoo" by Imran Khan many times). This was perfectly in accordance with the earlier judgement referred to above. Yet the same three member bench ruled that the deputy speaker Dost Mohammed Mazari had violated the law by not counting the ten votes.
Chief Justice Bandial had been requested to form a larger bench to decide this case because the three judges were known to be violently against the PML-N. In any other democratic country such biased judges would have refused to be involved in this case, yet the CJ went ahead and removed Hamza Shahbaz. In fact, even before declaring the verdict, he asked the President to take oath from the "dakoo" (dacoit) before midnight. I have never seen such shameless behavior. These 3 judges (Umar Atta Bandial, Ijazul Ahsan and Munib Akhtar will be remembered along with Saqib Nisar) for irreparably damaging Pakistan.
What they should have done, by the way, was to rescind the earlier judgement and allowed Hamza Shahbaz to remain the Chief Minister. But that would have meant that they deliberately violated the constitution just to support the Establishment (which is dreadfully scared that the Sharifs will return to power and reduce their powers).
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