Supreme Court Chaos

The Guardian has a very interesting read on the Supreme Court’s NRO decision:

Who profits from this? Rightwing members of the senior judiciary; sections of the military and intelligence establishment who regard Mr Zardari as too pro-American and want to stop him cracking down on the Afghan Taliban; and the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif. His own previous conviction was not covered by the NRO, but he profited from Ms Bhutto’s return to Pakistan by coming home from exile himself.

This is sure to stir quite a hornets nest. Do you think The Guardian is right? Who do you think benefits from the decision?

There was jubilation among Pakistan’s lawyers about the decision by the country’s supreme court to strike down an amnesty which allowed the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Ali Zardari to return from exile. Lawyers called the decision a landmark judgment. One former president of the Lahore High Court Bar Association, Anwar Kamal, said that the supreme court had closed the door on corruption in the country for all time to come. We shall see, but on one thing we should be clear. This was not purely a judicial act. The judgment reeked of politics, designed to unseat an unpopular president halfway through his term.

Any independent court worth its name would have struck down the national reconciliation ordinance (NRO), the selective amnesty that the former president Pervez Musharraf concocted in 2007 as part of a power-sharing deal with Ms Bhutto brokered by the US and Britain. But the supreme court went far beyond this. By turning the clock back to the date when the ordinance was issued, the court ordered that all cases and investigations frozen by the amnesty be revived.

Knowing that Mr Zardari would be protected by the immunity he gets from his position as president, the court ordered the government to inform the Swiss authorities that a case against him there may be reopened. The thinking behind this is that if the president cannot be prosecuted in his own land, he should be prosecuted in another. This is designed to increase the pressure on him to resign. The court also ordered the government to sack prosecutors, and ordered the interior minister Rehman Malik to issue himself with an arrest warrant. A decision conducted in the name of good governance was aimed instead at crippling the government.

Who profits from this? Rightwing members of the senior judiciary; sections of the military and intelligence establishment who regard Mr Zardari as too pro-American and want to stop him cracking down on the Afghan Taliban; and the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif. His own previous conviction was not covered by the NRO, but he profited from Ms Bhutto’s return to Pakistan by coming home from exile himself.

Mr Sharif has called for midterm elections. The unpopular Mr Zardari and his ruling Pakistan People’s party are far from blameless. They could have seen this situation coming. Yesterday they were forced to say they respected the judgment, but also insist the president would not resign. Politics and the law are entwined in Pakistan, but the jubilant lawyers should be wary of getting what they wish for. They could be preparing not just the ousting of the PPP from power, but the re-entry of the army into it.