Four years ago, the struggle of Pakistani Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and the "Lawyers' Movement" against the government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf appeared to many Western observers a clear-cut case of an independent judiciary defending democracy against a military dictator. Today, the chief justice, with the support of many lawyers, is still engaged in a struggle with the government, but now the goal is to prosecute the elected president, Asif Ali Zardari, for past corruption.
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This might seem perfectly in order, because allegations of corruption against Zardari have been widespread and credible. His immunity from prosecution stems from a 2007 decree issued by then-President Musharraf as part of a U.S.-sponsored deal to allow Benazir Bhutto and Zardari, her husband, to return to Pakistan and form a coalition with Musharraf and the Army.
Yet the chief justice's actions -- both in trying to prosecute the president and in charging the prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, with contempt of court for failing to cooperate with the prosecution -- also smack of an attempt to preempt democratic elections in Pakistan that are due within the next year. If these elections take place as scheduled, they will mark a significant milestone: the first time in Pakistan's history that an elected government has made it through to the end of its constitutional term without being overthrown.
Although Zardari's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) will almost certainly suffer heavy losses in the parliamentary elections, it may do much better beforehand in indirect Senate elections, allowing the PPP -- and conceivably even the president -- to retain a large share of power. Many therefore suspect that Chaudhry's real motive is a political one: to force the government out before these elections. While the chief justice is doubtless sincere in his passionate commitment to the independence and power of the judiciary, he is also conservative in background and believed to be extremely hostile to cooperation between Pakistan and the United States, as well as the role of the Zardari administration in maintaining this cooperation. It is unclear whether Chaudhry is close to the main opposition party led by Nawaz Sharif, but some of his subordinate judges certainly are.
A senior Pakistani official told me this week that the standoff between the executive and judicial branches was just a process of jockeying for position as these institutions gradually work out their respective places in the new democratic order. But others see it as a continuation of the institutional and political instability that has racked Pakistan since independence in 1947 and that could sometime in the future contribute to another collapse of democracy and return of military rule.
In recent years, other developments have led liberals to question their previous support for the chief justice and the Lawyers' Movement. Most shocking was the public support of many lawyers for the assassination of Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, who in January 2011 was murdered by one of his own bodyguards for criticizing Pakistan's blasphemy law, which has been repeatedly misused in private feuds and the persecution of religious minorities. A previous chief justice of the Lahore High Court himself justified this murder to me in an interview last year on the grounds that "the laws of God take precedence over the laws of man."
Pakistani courts have also repeatedly failed to convict terrorism suspects, even when the cases against them seemed clear-cut. They overturned both a ban on Jamaat-ud-Dawa -- the public face of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was responsible for the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks -- and a detention order against its leader, Hafiz Saeed. In a recent case, they acquitted four Pakistani Taliban activists accused of an attack on the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) headquarters in Lahore. As many Pakistanis have told them, this kind of verdict not only undermines the entire struggle against terrorism in Pakistan, but also encourages extrajudicial executions by the police and Army. In this case, all four men were promptly detained by the ISI under special anti-terrorism laws. And within a few weeks, all were dead under very suspicious circumstances.
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