Exclusive: Turn Down Nomination for Caretaker PM Post, Pakistan’s Bar Association Urges Gulzar Ahmed
Even as Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan has proposed the name of former Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed as the caretaker prime minister till the elections, Bar Associations have urged him to decline the nomination.
The Sindh High Court Bar Association, in its letter to Ahmed, a copy of which is with News18, has condemned the dissolution of the National Assembly on the advice of Khan, following the Speaker’s dismissal of the no-confidence motion.
“This association is also perturbed by the appointment of Ahmed as caretaker PM, when he has retired as the Chief Justice of Pakistan only two months ago. The ill-considered nomination will only go to lend strength to the perception that the Imran Khan government is and has been on the same page as the apex judiciary,” it said.
It added that acceptance of the role by Ahmed would be “tantamount to endorsing the brazenly illegal and unconstitutional acts of the Speaker and the PTI government”.
The association said that the Constitutional crisis necessitates a full court hearing, so that the Supreme Court can conclusively lay down the law to prevent future PMs from unconstitutional acts during a vote of no-confidence.
The body held that the dismissal of an elected Parliament on a “whimsical pretext of a foreign conspiracy” by the Speaker is entirely without jurisdiction. It added the Speaker has no power to suspend a “vote of no confidence, let alone on the outlandish pretext of declaring and condemning some 200 elected Parliamentarians from 4 provinces as agents of a foreign conspiracy”.
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Stating that such claims were earlier made by Fatima Jinnah, who heralded a series of Constitutional crises that ended in a civil war, the association called for a full-day strike from work on April 5.
Justice Ahmed was part of the five-judge bench of the Supreme Court that disqualified former premier Nawaz Sharif in the Panama Papers case. He was one of the two dissenting justices on the bench who were of the opinion that Sharif had not been honest to the nation and should be disqualified from office.
Amid the crisis, the caretaker PM will have to run the government on a temporary basis until the Prime Minister is chosen through elections.
The Constitution states the President shall appoint a Caretaker Government in consultation with the Prime Minister and Leader of Opposition post the dissolution of the National Assembly.
In case both the parties don’t reach a consensus, the President can choose a caretaker PM in consultation with the Election Commission of Pakistan.
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