Nation gets 26th Chief Justice

ISLAMABAD: Justice Asif Saeed Khosa, widely known as the poetic justice for giving literary references in his judgments, on Friday took oath as the 26th Chief Justice of Pakistan. He has replaced Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar, whose tenure had come to an end on Thursday.

President Arif Alvi administered the oath to him in a ceremony held at the President House. Prime Minister Imran Khan, Chief of the Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa, Chief of the Air Staff Mujahid Anwar Khan, Chief of the Naval Staff Admiral Zafar Mahmood Abbasi, National Assembly Speaker Asad Qaiser, ministers, Supreme Court judges, senior lawyers and government officials attended the ceremony.

Foreign dignitaries also witnessed the oath-taking ceremony. The chief justice will remain in the office till December 20, 2019. On his arrival at the Supreme Court, the chief justice was presented a guard of honor. Justice Khosa then headed bench number 1 and heard some cases.

Hearing his first case as the chief justice, he rejected a plea by a man arrested for peddling drugs. He rejected Noor Muhammad’s plea for a reduced sentence. In his verdict, the country’s top judge said that the witness in the case was a government official, who bore no ill-will towards the offender.

Noor Muhammad had earlier been sentenced to four and a half years jail for possessing 1,200kg of drugs. Addressing the full court reference held in the honor of Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar on the eve of his retirement, Justice Khosa had said that the apex court’s jurisdiction under Article 184(3) of the Constitution will be exercised very sparingly and only in respect of larger issues of national importance where either there is no other adequate or efficacious remedy available or the available constitutional or legal remedies are ineffective or are rendered incapacitated.

“Either through a full court meeting or through a judicial exercise an effort shall be made to determine and lay down the scope and parameters of exercise of the original jurisdiction of this court under Article 184(3) of the Constitution and, if deemed appropriate, to carve out the scope of an intra-court appeal in such matters through an appropriate amendment of the Supreme Court Rules or to suitably amend the provisions relating to review jurisdiction so as to enlarge its scope in such cases,” Justice Khosa had said.

Born in Dera Ghazi Khan on December 21, 1954, Justice Khosa obtained his degree in law from the United Kingdom in 1976. Son-in-law of former chief justice of Pakistan Justice Nasim Hassan Shah, Justice Khosa is one of the top jurists on criminal law.

In his career spanning over 19 years, he has decided about 55,000 cases, including 10,000 criminal cases, since 2014. The feat is acknowledged as his biggest contribution to the judiciary. At present, a few hundred criminal appeals are being heard.

Justice Khosa had expressed his resolve to take some big and hard decisions. He said it’s time to introduce some structural and systemic changes so as to minimise litigation, eliminate unnecessary delays and rationalise the workload.

“Time has also come when the judicial system as a whole needs to be redesigned or restructured and made simple and effective," he asserted. He had emphasised that all institutions need to work together for the country’s progress, and that there was a need for conversation on whether any institution was interfering in another institution’s work.

"Let us admit that in the recent past there has been a trust deficit between different organs of the state and every organ has reasons for sticking to its declared position... Let us discuss where each other’s domain has been encroached upon in the past and try to resolve such issues through a mutually agreed course of action. Let us discuss the alleged encroachment of the executive domain by the judiciary through interference in matters of policy, the alleged excessive use of its constitutional jurisdiction in matters which are administrative in nature and how best the judiciary can return to its normal but effective adjudicatory role.”