News & Events
The Greatest Moment in Pakistani Democracy
4/4/2010
Reprinted with permission from The Huffington Post.
Author: Mohsin Kamal Awan, Foreign Legal Advisor, Locke Lord Strategies
Related Practice: Public Law and Governmental Affairs
This week may very well be remembered in Pakistan as the greatest point in the restoration of democracy in its 63 year history. Yesterday, after a year long legislative effort led by President Asif Ali Zardari and his Pakistan Peoples Party in the National Assembly of Pakistan, agreement was finally reached on the most dramatic and sweeping constitutional changes in Pakistan's history, restoring the 1973 Pakistani Constitution, which created a Pakistani parliamentary democracy based on the British Westminster model. The 1973 Constitution had been perverted by the actions of two military dictators, Generals Zia ul Haq and Pervez Musharraf by stripping power from Parliament and creating a powerful extra-constitutional Presidential system, centralizing political power into their own hands after their respective coup d'états. The National Assembly and the Senate of Pakistan, meeting in Islamabad of undoing this tragedy by making our constitution whole and uniting our country across provinces, ethnicities and politics. What makes this even more remarkable is that the process was initiated and has been directed by the current President of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari. This may be the first time in recorded history that a national leader willingly sacrificed his own political power for the sake of restoring constitutional, democratic rule of law. The Parliamentary Committee, created at the request of the President last year, not only voted to restore the powers of Parliament, but also to depoliticize the judicial appointment process by creating multipartisan judicial selection. This too was another example of Zardari willingly directing that powers held by the president be returned to the National Assembly.
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