Pakistan Parties Challenge Musharraf Over Judges Vote

Islamabad — Pakistan’s National Assembly plans to pass a resolution this week to restore Supreme Court justices and other judges deposed by President Musharraf, party officials said.Mr. Musharraf purged 60 judges in November as the Supreme Court was considering whether to invalidate his re-election in October for a second five-year term. A restored court may resume the challenge to his tenure.Leaders of the new ruling coalition say they will use their two-thirds majority to pass a resolution allowing Prime Minister Gillani to order the reinstatement. The Pakistan Peoples Party, which heads the coalition, wants to avoid an immediate confrontation with Mr. Musharraf, and is pressing for some way to blunt the judges’ threat to him, analysts said.The Peoples Party may insist “on some understanding whereby the restored judges won’t immediately admit cases against Musharraf,” the chairman of the law department at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Osama Siddique, said. Any such arrangement would be contested and “there is no guarantee that a deal would stick,” he said.The Peoples Party leader, Asif Ali Zardari, was to continue talks in Islamabad yesterday with his main coalition partner, Nawaz Sharif, to complete the resolution’s text, a spokesman of Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League, Siddique ul-Farooq, said. The judges “hopefully will be restored before April 30,” Mr. Farooq told reporters after the party leaders met Monday.Mr. Sharif has insisted on the judges’ restoration as the price for staying in the coalition. An independent pollster, Gallup Pakistan, reported April 14 that 81% of Pakistanis surveyed favored the reinstatement of deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, whose defiance of Mr. Musharraf helped trigger the judicial purge.

Pakistan Parties Challenge Musharraf Over Judges Vote

Pakistan Parties Challenge Musharraf Over Judges Vote

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