[DAWN] BOWING to the supremacy of parliament and express language of the Constitution, the Supreme Court of Pakistain has dismissed the challenges to the 18th and 21st Amendments. Effectively, then, the new military court system designed to try civilian terrorism suspects in virtual secrecy and approved by a two-thirds majority of both houses of parliament in January will resume functioning. Prison sentences and even the death penalty handed down by such courts will, if upheld on appeal, be implemented. The country is set to have a parallel judicial system for all intents and purposes until the sunset clause in the 21st Amendment expires in 2016. Yesterday was certainly bittersweet: the SC did the right thing in allowing the will of parliament to prevail, but it was the will of parliament itself that was flawed -- no democratic system should ever have military courts in the manner and for the reasons they have been foisted on the country by the military leadership after the Beautiful Downtown Peshawar...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire.
carnage last December.
The judgment itself, nearly a thousand pages long and in two languages, will be closely examined in the days ahead and will have far-reaching implications for a range of issues, from the basic feature/basic structure doctrine to whether future amendments to the Constitution can be challenged in court. None of that, though, will address a two-fold challenge that the country faces as a result of its elected representatives choosing the profoundly undemocratic path of military courts: reforming the criminal justice system on an urgent basis and ensuring that the life of the new military courts is not extended again for any reason whatsoever in 2016, when the sunset clause in the 21st Amendment will go into effect. Unhappily, the law ministry seems uniquely ill-equipped -- even in comparison to the lack of full-time, ministerial leadership and dysfunction in other key ministries such as foreign affairs and defence -- to lead from the front.