Bilal Qureshi's open letter to Iftikhar Chaudhary, A G Noorani

Chief Justice, Please Initiate Suo Moto Action About These Issues - Here are some my suggestions to you; three issues that many Pakistanis feel deserve your immediate attention:

1. Initiate Suo Moto action against the people who orchestrated an attack on Pakistan’s Supreme Court at the time when the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was about to be disqualified from holding public office. If the issue of NRO, which is insignificant given Pakistan’s other challenges, can be tried and decided with such swiftness, the attack on the Supreme Court that you now chair deserves to be examined as well.

2. Seek and deliver justice to retired Chief Justice Sajad Ali Shah. Otherwise, those Pakistanis who feel your actions in negating the NRO was merely targeted at people from smaller provinces, especially from Sind, will have their fears justified.

3. Institute an independent panel that shall review corruption charges levelled against you by General Musharraf. It will only be fair if an independent body of legal experts, accountability professionals and other law enforcement official reviewed all the facts and evidence against you and make recommendations based on their findings about your suitability as a Chief Justice . Until then you should step aside ...[thanks Beena]

A G Noorani - The author explains that the book “focusses on the activities, recommendations, and policy decisions of three generations of often frustrated U.S. officials as they dealt with the problem in Washington, the United Nations, and the subcontinent. The book also refers more briefly to the efforts of private American citizens and organisations to develop formulas that they hoped could contribute to progress toward a settlement. I have written it from an American perspective. I have reviewed Indian, Pakistani, and British material and exchanged ideas with South Asians in government and outside who are familiar with the Kashmir problem. But I have deliberately focussed primarily on official and non-official U.S. sources to craft my account and reach my conclusions. I have also drawn on my own Kashmir experiences as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer stationed in India and Pakistan in the 1960s and 1970s as well as my work in those years and later in State Department offices responsible for making American policy in the region. In the final chapter, I have recommended approaches to the problem in the context of broader U.S. policies on India and Pakistan and such pressing global issues as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and counterterrorism.”

The Media Earthquake of the Decade