APROPOS Babar Sattar`s article `Back to the drawing board?` (Jan 26), it is worth mentioning that the issue of civil-military imbalance and demilitarisation of the criminal justice system is holding the attention of the writer to the exclusion of the dangerposed tonationalsecurity bythe all-pervasive menace of terrorism.
Mr Sattar, true to his lawyer`s instincts, fails to see beyond the legal matrix and the turf loyalty that compels him to root for a `due process` for terrorists.
Shorn of legal verbiage and institutional criticism, his main arguments boil down to a hankering for a full restoration of courtroom privileges for suspects in murder trials, who allegedly kill and celebrate their gory deeds in the name of religion.
Why does his scalpel of legal analysis not cut through the dysfunctional layers of judicial stupor in the face of terrorism? Why does he not question the exalted lords in the higher judiciary about their inefficacy in reforming the criminal justice system after appropriating all powers unto themselves, including those of selecting the judges ofhighercourts? Doesn`t the writer not know that it was Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry who virtually left the parliament toothless in the affair of elevation of the judges of higher courts? And I ask the writer as to who is to be blamed more, a dysfunctional investigation/ prosecution system or the complaisant judiciary.
Hence, instead of training the guns of legal criticism on the military courts, the writer is well-advised to concentrate on an advocacy for internal reforms in the judiciary by an overempowered judiciary, courtesy 18th Amendment.
