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Islamabad: Leader of Pakistan's top bar association Aitzaz Ahsan has called for prompt action by the incoming government to restore scores of deposed superior courts' judges.
Speaking to media in Lahore, where he has spent more than three months under house arrest, Ahsan said if the judges were not reinstated lawyers from all over the country would converge on Islamabad next month.
"We will gather in the capital on March 9, the anniversary of the day last year when [then] chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry charged with misconduct and sent on forced leave," said the president of the Supreme Court Bar Association.
Ahsan, also a prominent figure in the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), spoke to reporters at his residence after a US diplomat met him, the first such contact allowed by the authorities since he was cloistered.
He said he had been informed by the provincial government that the detention order against him was being withdrawn. In July last year the Supreme Court threw out the charges against Chaudhry and reinstated him.
But on November 3 President Pervez Musharraf imposed emergency, suspended the constitution and removed Chaudhry and scores of other judges of the Supreme Court and provincial high courts.
Before revoking, in December, the extra-constitutional measures that he said he had taken due to the judiciary's bid to oust him, Musharraf restructured the top court and appointed a new chief justice and judges.
Lawyers have been agitating for the reinstatement of the fired judges and the restoration of the judiciary to its pre-emergency status, a demand also fully backed by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N.
Sharif's party has emerged second after PPP in Monday's elections that dealt a crippling blow to pro-Musharraf PML-Q.
While Sharif has renewed after the polls his party's pledge for the restoration of fired judges and independent judiciary, PPP has not gone beyond saying the issue should be resolved in the new parliament, as contacts to cobble together a coalition government continue.
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