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- May 8, 2024
- Kainat Shakeel
- 0
Lawyers launched a protest demonstration and sought to enter the Lahore High Court (LHC), turning Lahore’s GPO Chowk into a battlefield between them and riot police on Wednesday. Police deployed water cannons, tear gas, and baton charges to disperse the lawyers after they attempted to enter the high court. As lawyers, including those from the Lahore High Court Bar Association (LHCBA), protested against the moving of a court and demanded that a terror case against their fellow lawyers be dropped, violence broke out, according to Dawn.com correspondent Rana Bilal, who was on the scene.
The correspondent reported that several members of the press, law enforcement, and onlookers were also impacted by the police response, which resulted in the arrest and injuries of numerous lawyers. The correspondent on the scene also reported that attempts at resolution of the standoff have so far failed in negotiations between the police and attorneys. Inspector General Dr. Usman Anwar has been instructed by Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz to “refrain from using force against the lawyers.” Attorneys must also civilly settle their disputes with LHC. Confrontation should be avoided for the people of Lahore’s safety, she wrote in a post on X.
Asad Butt, President of LHCBA, told Dawn News that the attorneys will not stop protesting till their demands are fulfilled. Butt claimed that other attorneys had been hurt by tear gas shelling, adding, “The police have inflicted cruelty by using force against a peaceful march.” He insisted on the dismissal of all lawsuits brought against attorneys and the quick withdrawal of the division of courts’ notice. The LHCBA’s joint action committee, which consists of twelve members, met on Tuesday and resolved to “welcome” the protest rally that the Lahore Bar Association had organized, according to a press release issued by the Punjab Bar Council on May 7.
The Punjab Bar Council has requested that terror cases against attorneys be dropped and that the notice of “dividing the lawyers under the guise of the unjust division of Model Town courts” be retracted. It had also declared an all-out strike in all Punjabi bar associations.
In a strong condemnation of the “police high-handedness against the peacefully protesting lawyers,” the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) urged Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Qazi Faez Isa to consider the incident on a suo motu basis. The executive committee of the SCBA, Secretary Syed Ali Imran, and President Shahzad Shaukat “expressed solidarity with the lawyers and their just stance” in a statement. The statement emphasized that “many lawyers have reportedly sustained serious injuries and many have been unjustly detained.”
It insisted that the injured receive emergency medical care and that the attorneys who had been detained be released right away. Additionally, LHC Chief Justice Malik Shahzad Ahmad Khan was sharply criticized and denounced by the SCBA attorneys for his “inept handling of this very sensitive matter,” claiming that he “failed to resolve the issue despite repeated appeals from the Bar.” “A blatant violation of the principles of democracy, freedom of expression, and the right to dissent,” they emphasized, were the lawyers’ arrests. “This demonstration will turn into a national movement, with SCBA leading the call for national action if the police brutality continues unchecked and the lawyers’ reasonable and fair demands are not met,” the Bar stated in a statement.
Vice-Chairman Riazat Ali Sahar of the Pakistan Bar Council (PBC) also “vehemently condemned the reprehensible police brutality inflicted upon” the lawyers. Sahar announced that attorneys nationwide would “convene protest meetings, marches, and rallies in their respective bar rooms” in addition to staging a “complete strike” tomorrow in a press release, a copy of which can be found on Dawn.com. He explained the rationale behind the demonstration, stating that the attorneys were “participating in a nonviolent demonstration against the announcement of case transfers to the ‘Model Town kutchery’ and the unwarranted filing of terrorist cases against their association.”
PBC vice chairman condemned the “excessive and unwarranted use of police force against lawyers” and called for senior police officers, the federal government, and Punjab to take “immediate and decisive action to address the involvement of police officials in this shameful and inhuman act.” He went on to express his dissatisfaction in the chief judge of the LHC, saying that part of the problem was that the long-standing issue could not be resolved through peaceful negotiation. Television images from earlier in the day showed a huge number of riot police and lawyers fighting, and GPO Chowk appeared to be covered in tear gas.
The Lahore Traffic Police announced a diversion at High Court Chowk and Istanbul Chowk towards GPO Chowk in a post on X at about 12:30 p.m. It further stated that “additional contingents” and the Cantt deputy superintendent of police were present at the scene. The head of Dawn News’ Lahore bureau, Muhammad Bilal, stated that all gates and roads leading to the Lahore High Court had been closed, preventing attorneys from accessing the court. He pointed out that a sizable police presence, including water cannons and anti-riot personnel, had already arrived at the location because the LHCBA had advertised the event in advance.
“The rally was peaceful as it moved toward the court. As soon as the attorneys attempted to enter the court, the police started to intervene, according to the bureau chief, who called the circumstances “quite tense. A senior superintendent of police responded that the demonstrators had initially thrown stones at the officers and attempted to start a brawl when questioned about why the police had resorted to blasting the attorneys.