Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Paula Newberg, director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, about Pakistan's newly reinstated Supreme Court chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry.
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LISA MULLINS: Iftikhar Chaudhry has been at the center of Pakistani politics for years now, but he's not a politician. Chaudhry is the Chief Justice of Pakistan's Supreme Court. He was put back on the bench just last week, about a year and a half after he was jettisoned. Chaudhry, you see, had run afoul of Pakistan's then-President Pervez Musharraf. He incurred Musharraf's distrust by calling attention to terrorist suspects who had disappeared after their arrest. Paula Newberg directs the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. She says Chaudhry's independence was unprecedented in Pakistan.
PAULA NEWBERG: Justice Chaudhry as chief justice ruled against the court's previous habit of just assenting to what the central government said, and therefore took up the case of these disappeared prisoners as his own -- and that was a huge problem which put him on the outs with the regime and led to his dismissal.
MULLINS: So when he made his decisions as the Chief Justice of the Pakistani Supreme Court, clearly he had some kind of independence – which I think might surprise many people from the outside, that there was independence in the judiciary itself. But was he also incurring the wrath, this Chief Justice, of the United States given that the US was severely and is still very much pressing Pakistan to crack down on terrorists?
NEWBERG: It's hard to say. I mean, the United States certainly made no official claims to my knowledge, to the government of Pakistan saying, “Do something about this judge.†It did, however, make a great impression in Pakistan because the court did, as it has done in the past, manage to raise an issue to public consciousness in a way that hadn't been the case before.
MULLINS: Now, there are very high expectations for this Chief Justice who is back in power right now. People are throwing rose petals at him. They believe he's going to fix all matters of injustices in the country. What do you say to that? I mean, how realistic is it?
NEWBERG: Well, I think one of the expectations that the Court now has is that it will somehow balance the executive, since the Parliament is so weak. Many, many Pakistanis are hoping that because Parliament is weak and the President is not experienced that the courts will somehow rise above all this and adjudicate from on high. That's something that no doubt, Justice Chaudhry is going to try to circumvent as much as possible. It puts way too many expectations on an institution that has no executive powers. It can't force anybody to do anything. The second is that some of the outstanding constitutional issues are those that are almost retrospective in nature. For example, there is the question of whether General Musharraf had issued an emergency correctly, whether he had allowed himself to stay in power correctly, and many Pakistanis want to see these issues aired and see only the courts as being the place to do so. So the Chief Justice has become the fulcrum for many, many issues that really should be decided elsewhere. But because Pakistanis don't necessarily have a place to have these decisions made, are coming more and more to rest at the feet of the court.
MULLINS: How should people, as they hear about this man here in the United States, be thinking about the importance of whether he's in office or not? I mean, what does this mean for America's interest?
NEWBERG: My own feeling is that America's interest is best upheld if Pakistan is as democratic as possible. For that to be the case, the court has to be assertive, it has to hold government to account, it has to make sure that it is not corrupt, and it has to do whatever it can to try to strengthen the Parliament which is to say – to pass good laws so that following the rule of law is a logical thing. United States has a mixed history of wanting to support democracies when it has other interests in that country. But I'm hoping that the Obama administration will not try to temper the relationships that the court has with the rest of the country, because it is in everyone's long-term interest, even if it appears not to be in its short-term interest, to make sure that Pakistan can govern itself as well as possible.
MULLINS: All right. Paula Newberg is director of Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. She writes on issues related to South and Central Asia for the online journal Yale Global Online. Nice to speak with you. Thank you.
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