US urged to support Pakistani lawyers

WASHINGTON, March 2: America’s largest legal fraternity — the National Lawyers Guild — has invited several high-ranking lawyers from Pakistan to tour the United States.

The lawyers will visit major cities and explain their effort to restore the judges dismissed by President Pervez Musharraf.

American lawyers associated with the guild will also address these meetings and urge the US administration to change its policy of “blindly trusting” President Musharraf as an ally in the war on terror despite his administration’s efforts to deprive the judiciary of its independence and to impose restrictions on the press.

Attorney Ryan Hancock, the vice-president of NLG’s mid-Atlantic region, said the centrepiece of the tour will be NLG’s mid-Atlantic regional conference in Philadelphia this week at the Drexel University College of Law.

The closing session of the conference is titled “Rule of Law and Pakistan’s Lawyers’ Movement: Then and Now” and will feature three leaders of the movement, Hamid Khan, Muneer Malik and Sahibzada Anwar Hamid.

An NLG delegation of four lawyers and four law students visited Pakistan for 11 days in January and recently issued a report that called for a “major change in US policy, away from support for military dictatorship and towards support of genuine democracy and rule of law in Pakistan.”

An independent judiciary “is fundamental to a free society,” the report says, and the NLG delegation “has concluded that any outcome short of restoring the judges serving on November 2, 2007 will have long-term negative impacts on the rule of law in Pakistan by subjecting the judiciary — and therefore the entire government and the country’s 160 million people — to the whim of the executive.”

In NLG’s trip to Pakistan, Mr Hancock said, members of the delegation travelled to all of the major cities where they conducted interviews with more than 50 jurists, lawyers, political party representatives, elected officials, civil servants, journalists and members of civil society.