Human Rights Watch Report on Pakistan's Crackdown on Lawyers and Judges

Human Rights Watch has released a new report, Destroying Legality: Pakistan’s Crackdown on Lawyers and Judges, detailing the crackdown on attorneys and judges in Pakistan earlier this year and suggesting how the United States must alter its foreign policy to ensure the survival of an independent judiciary in Pakistan.

From the Report's executive summary:

In the name of fighting terrorism and Islamist extremism, Musharraf instead mounted what was effectively a coup against Pakistan’s civil society. Targets of the crackdown included lawyers, judges, human rights activists, opposition political party members, journalists, students, and academics. The declaration of the state of emergency itself was not, as Musharraf claimed, necessitated by new terrorism threats, but by perceived threats to his own continued rule by an energized, principled lawyers’ movement calling for genuine respect for independence of the judiciary and the rule of law. Scores of government opponents including lawyers remain in prison across the country today; the leaders of the lawyers’ movement and senior judges of the Supreme Court remain under house arrest.... This report provides an analysis of the crackdown on lawyers and judges and its significance, based on interviews with eyewitnesses and victims. It is the most detailed empirical account to date of what happened during the November crackdown and ensuing events.... [U.S. Secretary of State] Rice’s notion that elections will cure the Musharraf government’s broad attack on democratic institutions such as the judiciary is mistaken. Free and fair elections and a genuine transformation to a parliamentary government are unlikely so long as the judiciary cannot function as an independent branch and laws remain on the books that allow Musharraf to manipulate the political environment on whim.

The events in Pakistan highlight the importance of legal institutions in a democracy as well as the perils of speaking truth to power. [NA]