This isn't about the American jury system, except that it is. On Saturday, Pakistan's leader suspended the country's constitution, fired the judges of the supreme court, and appointed new judges -- and lawyers are in the streets. From the New York Times this morning:
Police armed with tear gas and clubs attacked thousands of protesting lawyers in the city of Lahore today, and rounded up lawyers in other cities as the government of the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, faced the first signs of concerted resistance to the imposition of emergency rule.
An estimated 150 lawyers were arrested in Lahore after a pitched battle between police and lawyers who stood on the roof of the High Court throwing stones at the police below. Some of the lawyers had bleeding heads as they were shoved into police vans, and some fainted in the clouds of tear gas.
Imagine that. Hundreds of members of your local bar association on the roof of the courthouse, throwing stones at police, bleeding, being taken away.
- "In Multan, another city in the province of Punjab, two new judges who had taken the oath of office under emergency rule Sunday were forced to leave the courtroom after hundreds of lawyers threatened to throw eggs at them. "We threatened them saying: ‘You’ve taken an unconstitutional oath, if you don’t go we will throw eggs at you.’ They left,” said a lawyer from Multan, Riaz Gilani."
- "Lawyers in the capital, Islamabad, and the nearby garrison town of Rawalpindi said they did not go to the courts because they were warned they would be arrested and possibly beaten."
- In the "relatively small district of Jhang in the western Punjab, 47 lawyers who were politically active, including a senior lawyer, Fareed Naul, had been jailed," one politician said.
I write this from the comfort of a desk, and you're likely reading it from the comfort of yours. We complain, often rightly, about our justice system. But I hope I would have -- do have -- the kind of courage to protect it that Pakistani lawyers showed today.
(Screen shot of news anchors announcing chief justices's firing by ange embuldeniya at http://www.flickr.com/photos/iange/1845074552/; license details there.)
