The retirement of the longest-serving chief justice of the country, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, in the next few days necessitates the need to evaluate the functioning of the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SCP) under his leadership.

In my view, the foremost contribution of the Supreme Court (SC) during this time is the judicial intervention in the cases of missing persons or enforced disappearances. The SC has been persistent and relentless in its efforts to recover detainees from the country’s security apparatus or obtain information regarding their whereabouts since the year 2006. This came with a price: in his proclamation of emergency declared on November 3, 2007, then president General Pervez Musharraf stated that some members of the judiciary were working at cross purposes with the executive and legislature in the fight against terrorism and extremism.

The commitment and resolve of the Supreme Court under Iftikhar Chaudhry did not diminish in any manner even after the restoration of judiciary as a result of the historic Lawyers’ Movement. Such intervention of the SC has yielded some useful outcomes -- curtailing violations of the fundamental right to security of a person, introduction of laws, such as Action (In Aid of Civil Powers) Regulations, 2011, appointment of Commissions of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, formation of a federal taskforce to provide policy guidelines, and disclosure of vital information regarding the whereabouts of the missing persons.

The development of human rights jurisprudence that redefines the scope of fundamental rights is another positive contribution of the SC under Iftikhar Chaudhry. Such interventions have not been free from criticism at all times. The criticisms have come mainly in areas where the SC has intervened in the appointments made by the government on key posts, such as chairman NAB, chairman OGRA, chairman SECP, civil servants in grade 22, prices of essential commodities such as sugar, wheat, flour and other utilities, and supervision of investigations in cases of alleged mega corruption.

The criticism has been directed essentially at the SC’s lack of requisite expertise to deal with the subject, separation of powers, judicial encroachment on the powers of the executive, and effectiveness or otherwise of the intervention in the absence of a political will on the part of the government.

Personally speaking, I find some justification in most of these interventions. However, some of the criticisms are not without their merit -- such as the complexity of subject and the lack of expertise, the matter being in the executive’s purview, the danger of encroaching upon other fundamental rights of citizens, such as the right to fair trial, etc.

Most of these criticisms can be effectively responded to by the SC in the future by the manner and extent of intervention in such judicial proceedings. Be that as it may, one expects the discourse on the subject to continue for sometime in the future and judged normatively, that is through comparison of experience.

Through its intervention in the Eighteenth Amendment to the constitution, the judiciary succeeded in "negotiating" with the parliament the procedure embodied in Article 175A of the Constitution for the appointment of judges to the superior courts. It succeeded in insulating the procedure against all external influences including the political influence.

The balance of power has now shifted from the chief justices to a more representative Judicial Commission; yet what it sought to do by limiting the oversight of Parliamentary Committee is a subject of great criticism.

In this period, an altogether new life has been injected into the Human Rights’ Cell established in the SCP. It is said to receive more than 50,000 applications/letters/complaints every year, out of which almost 3,000 are sifted and fixed for hearing and passing appropriate orders. This process has allowed the shaping and reshaping of judicial responses to human rights violations.

For the masses at large, the perception of rule of law is changed and the image of SC as the ultimate saviour is strengthened. The downside is that everyone wants to rush to the SC with the hope that it shall solve all problems, which it clearly is incapable of.

Hope for justice from the SC is not only a result of a dysfunctional executive but also of a less effective and inexpeditious judicial system operating at the level of district courts. Besides judges, lawyers, police and witnesses too are equally responsible for the failure of the judicial system at the grassroot level.

The Judicial Policy framed in 2009 and revised in 2012 suggested some improvements which have not been implemented. Indeed, one major criticism advanced by the critics of the legacy of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry is that while he took suo motu action on every other issue, he did not provide justice to his judges (of subordinate courts mostly) attacked by the lawyers simply because he did not want to lose the lawyers’ support.

It is evident that the prevalent procedures for accountability of lawyers and other professionals are inadequate. Indeed, the accountability of judges of high courts and the SCP continues to be an internal matter, just like the armed forces.

While, on the one hand, it has protected the independence of judiciary from the executive and legislature, on the other, it does not give the citizens of Pakistan access to any information whatsoever regarding the receipt of the number of complaints in the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) and their disposal thereof.

The disclosure of information regarding the total number of complaints received by the SJC over a certain period of time, their consideration and disposal is equally essential to dispel any impression that the procedure of administrative accountability of judges envisaged by Article 209 of the Constitution is ineffective. This is apart from the requirement of citizens’ fundamental right to information as embodied in Article 19A.

In order to avoid a perception of marginalisation of dissenting views, the forthcoming Chief Justice of Pakistan may like to structure his administrative discretion by constituting all matters falling under Article 184(3) of the Constitution to be fixed before a bench of five or more senior-most judges and creating a more conducive environment to allow dissenting voices, if any, on the bench.

Whether the Supreme Court is justified or not in the expansion of its judicial power shall be a subject of discourse for some time. What remains undisputed is that Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry has provided an alternative narrative to the judicial history of Pakistan, re-defining the role of judiciary vis-a-vis the state and society by setting standards that the future chief justices will not find easy to ignore.