Beena Sarwar: Justice Sabih's legacy
Twenty years ago, as a lawyer, he drafted a groundbreaking legislation regarding organ donations. His colleague and fellow advocate Syed Iqbal Haider twice presented the draft law as a private members' bill before the Senate. The powerful vested interests of the commercial transplantation lobby kept getting it shelved. Eventually, years of hard work and lobbying by dedicated visionaries like Dr Adeebul Hasan Rizvi and his colleagues got the bill through as a presidential ordinance in October 2007. The commercial transplantation lobby appealed against it on the grounds that it was against Islam. On April 18, 2009, after extensive deliberations, the Federal Shariat Court ruled that organ donations are compatible with Islam, and outlawed commercial transplantations. That was also the day that Justice Sabih breathed his last.
His judgments strengthened human rights principles and gave relief to the aggrieved. His ruling of 1997 ordering the payment of monetary compensation to a detenu in a habeas corpus petition made judicial history in Pakistan. As chief justice of the Sindh High Court he encouraged out-of-the-box thinking, like allowing a judge of the Sindh High Court to take up appeals in interior Sindh as an experiment in 2007. Sitting at the Sukkur High Court, the judge (Justice Rehmat Shah Jafri) found that people had been in prison for 25-30 years on average. Refusing adjournments, he dealt with 300 appeals and disposed of 70 per cent of the murder cases in two months.
Women's rights organisations always found Justice Sabih sympathetic. In one instance, he got the hearings of two rape cases transferred to Karachi from interior Sindh where the rape survivors felt threatened by the accused.
He was among the judges who refused to take oath under Musharraf's PCO following the Emergency declaration of Nov 3, 2007. His steadfastness was an example to his brother judges. At one of the judge's homes in Karachi, where civil society activists presented flowers to the dissenting judges, Justice Sabihuddin succinctly explained why they should be supported even if they had taken oath under an earlier PCO.
His judgments strengthened human rights principles and gave relief to the aggrieved. His ruling of 1997 ordering the payment of monetary compensation to a detenu in a habeas corpus petition made judicial history in Pakistan. As chief justice of the Sindh High Court he encouraged out-of-the-box thinking, like allowing a judge of the Sindh High Court to take up appeals in interior Sindh as an experiment in 2007. Sitting at the Sukkur High Court, the judge (Justice Rehmat Shah Jafri) found that people had been in prison for 25-30 years on average. Refusing adjournments, he dealt with 300 appeals and disposed of 70 per cent of the murder cases in two months.
Women's rights organisations always found Justice Sabih sympathetic. In one instance, he got the hearings of two rape cases transferred to Karachi from interior Sindh where the rape survivors felt threatened by the accused.
He was among the judges who refused to take oath under Musharraf's PCO following the Emergency declaration of Nov 3, 2007. His steadfastness was an example to his brother judges. At one of the judge's homes in Karachi, where civil society activists presented flowers to the dissenting judges, Justice Sabihuddin succinctly explained why they should be supported even if they had taken oath under an earlier PCO.
posted by temporal at 5/08/2009
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