Is parliament sovereign?
By Kunwar Idris
Sunday, 03 Oct, 2010
IN the current political crisis the prime minister routinely refers to the parliament as ‘sovereign’ to assure his nervous party men that in the argument over jurisdiction, parliament’s will must prevail over the writ of the Supreme Court.
He is mistaken — even as a legislative body its performance has been disappointing. In countries governed by written constitutions, authority for the decision-making process and for the maintenance of order (that is what sovereignty implies) is spread across all organs of the state. In a federation, it is also shared with the constituent units. Sovereignty belongs to the people, or the nation, if you will and not to an individual or any one institution.
The prime minister’s bravado aside, the right of the highest court of the land to interpret the constitution and to declare laws enacted by the legislatures unconstitutional is now universally recognised. Even in Britain which has no written constitution, the sovereignty of parliament is limited and the liberty and rights of the citizens are protected by the intricate web of common law.
Sovereignty can flow only from a constitution that is based on a compact of the people and the agreement of the federation’s component units. The essence of shared sovereignty is the rule of law from which all citizens, and units too, must equally benefit. The laws are made by legislators and administered by judges who may strike a law down if it is held to be oppressive or discriminatory.
The ongoing argument over sovereignty and jurisdiction can be clinched only in the Supreme Court. The expectation should be that the process does not result in shutting down the courts or, at the other extreme, in handing over the head of state to a foreign government for trial. It is important to discover the truth and not to humiliate anyone nor to disrupt the working of the courts.
The judges should get out of the fray to deal with more than a million cases pending at various levels for years, some for generations, and the legislators should turn to their basic duty of serving the people for whom life was never harder.
The point to emphasise here is that decisions based on the constitution must lead to better governance to relieve the hardships of the people that keep mounting while their leaders engage in turf wars. Only the other day when the Sindh Assembly was debating what Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah described as the greatest human tragedy and economic disaster ever to visit the province, his chief ally — the MQM — was leading a march through the heart of Karachi’s business district (disrupting whatever little economic activity that still goes on) to denounce Dr Aafia Siddiqui’s conviction by an American court.
The MQM’s delayed rally was obviously to demonstrate that in its citadel of power it could put up a more intimidating show of force than was done earlier by the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) and other religious groups. Surely, all the protesting parties know that they could not alter the course of American justice just as worldwide protests could not prevent Z.A. Bhutto’s hanging.
Whether Aafia Siddiqui’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice or a challenge to our national honour, as the JI thought it was, and even if Pakistan were to sever all relations with the US as the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam demanded, street protests cannot help her or her aggrieved folk.
If the intention was to relieve their misery and not to exploit it to their political advantage, the protesting parties should have been pooling resources to arrange Aafia’s defence in appeal. No street protest in the US would persuade the courts here to free an American convicted in Pakistan. In America the institution of justice is much less amenable to official or popular pressure.
Preoccupied with the question of sovereignty, the political parties have lost whatever little claim they could lay to the service of the people. After much dithering a commission has been constituted to oversee the rehabilitation of flood victims but neither its charter nor its authority over the executing agencies has been notified. Resultantly Mumtaz Bhutto and other leaders are still rushing to the courts for adjudication.
Unless the commission has been formed only to appease wary donors, it should be empowered to lay down the rehabilitation policy. For instance, whether the displaced rural folk who sought refuge in Karachi and Hyderabad should be allowed to settle there or compelled to go back to their villages is a question which should be decided by the commission and not by politicians. And so should also be the question of whether the grant for repairing or rebuilding homes is to be uniform or related to the value of the property damaged or destroyed. Such precautions would keep political considerations out of a humanitarian effort.
As the people already weighed down by falling incomes and rising inflation are about to be burdened with more taxes, the extravagance of the government and vulgar display of ‘protocol’ stick out like a sore thumb. As lack of trust in the political system has driven us to the commissions, one on economy in public expenditure needs to be set up without delay. This writer has no doubt that the expenditure of political establishments can be reduced to one-third and that of the bureaucracy to half. It would save money and increase efficiency.
How one wishes that the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank were to make a huge cut in the size of the government and privatisation of the Steel Mills, PIA and railways as conditions for their loans. Any locally tendered advice, howsoever sane and authentic, is more likely to be laughed away than heeded.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/...-sovereign-300