A deputy superintendent of police (DSP) and a constable were martyred on Friday night when unknown attackers opened fire on their vehicle in Lakki Marwat, an official said on Saturday.
DSP Gul Muhammad and Constable Nadeem Gul had set up a temporary checkpoint at the Manjiwala Chowk near the Indus Highway when unknown assailants opened fire on their vehicle, killing both, according to Bannu police spokesperson Bashir Khan.
A post on X of two of the martyred police officials.—KP Police
The bodies were shifted to the Tehsil Headquarters Hospital in the Sarai Naurang district of Lakki Marwat.
That same night, in a separate incident in the Sara Darga district of Lakki Marwat, Constable Sanamat Khan was martyred when unknown assailants opened fire at him near his house. He was stationed in Miranshah, North Waziristan and had returned home on leave.
The assailants in both incidents are at large.
On Saturday morning, funeral prayers for the martyred police officials were held with official honours at Iqbal Shaheed Police Line in Bannu.
District Police Officer (DPO) Bannu Ziauddin Ahmed, DPO Lakki Marwat Taimur Khan, SP Operation Bannu Sanaullah and army officers laid flower wreaths on the coffins of the martyred and prayed for them.
DPO Ahmed praised the martyrs as being brave, dutiful and noble, adding that the Bannu police stand with the bereaved families in their hour of grief.
“We are proud of such young people who died fighting bravely,” he said.
“The blood of the martyrs will not go in vain,” DPO Ahmed said, adding that “terrorists will not demoralise us with cowardly acts.”
DPO Khan said police forces have, in the past, sacrificed their lives for the country, which the entire nation values.
The attacks are the latest in a series of incidents targeting police officials in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
On Tuesday, six policemen were injured when unknown miscreants attacked them in the Township area of Bannu.
In March, two traffic police constables were martyred when unknown motorcyclists opened fire on them in Darra Pezu town in Lakki Marwat.
RAWALPINDI: Former information minister in the PTI government Fawad Chaudhry, who had been granted bail by the Islamabad High Court (IHC), was released from Adiala Jail on Friday.
On Monday, an IHC division bench comprising Chief Justice Aamer Farooq and Justice Tariq Mehmood Jahangiri granted bail to Mr Chaudhry in a case related to alleged corruption in acquiring land for a dual carriageway project in Jhelum.
The National Accountability Bureau had accused him of receiving “illegal gratification” from a contractor in the Lilla-Pind Dadan Khan-Jhelum dual carriageway project.
The bureau also accused him of approving a petrol pump along the dual carriageway road project “for his personal interest” and misusing his authority and influence to help his relatives and others with the purchase of land along the dual carriageway.
Mr Chaudhry’s counsel argued that the case against his client was politically motivated and brought just for political victimisation and to stop the petitioner from contesting the general elections. The lawyer said nothing was recovered during his client’s physical remand.
Sources said more than 28 cases have been registered against Fawad Chaudhry in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Multan, Attock, Faisalabad and Jhelum.
Islamabad on Saturday denounced the “provocative” remarks made by Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh in a televised interview yesterday, in which he appeared to confirm that New Delhi was carrying out an assassination campaign in Pakistan, as reported by The Guardian.
“If any terrorist from a neighbouring country tries to disturb India or carry out terrorist activities here, he will be given a fitting reply. If he escapes to Pakistan we will go to Pakistan and kill him there,” Singh said in an interview to Indian TV news network News18 on Friday.
Singh’s remarks followed The Guardian’s investigative report, published on Thursday, which said at least 20 individuals had been murdered in Pakistan since 2020 at the behest of Indian intelligence operatives. The report said it had seen evidence provided by Pakistani security agencies, and noted that Indian officers confirmed the new policy of assassinating enemies and dissidents on foreign soil. India’s Ministry of External Affairs had denied the allegations.
Singh said that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made it clear this policy was “right” and that “India has the capability to do so. Pakistan has also started understanding this.”
Singh’s comments are the first time that India has acknowledged any assassinations by its operatives on foreign soil, The Guardianreported in a follow-up story published on Friday.
In October 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had cited what he said was credible evidence of a potential link between Indian agents and the murder of a Sikh separatist leader. The following month, the US Department of Justice had said an Indian government official directed an unsuccessful plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist on US soil.
On January 25, Foreign Secretary Syrus Sajjad Qazi had said in a press conference that there was “credible evidence” of links between Indian agents and the assassination of two Pakistani nationals in Sialkot and Rawalakot.
In the Foreign Office statement issued today, Pakistan has officially condemned what it describes as “provocative remarks” made by the Indian defence minister.
The Foreign Office detailed in the foreign secretary’s presser on Jan 25, Pakistan had provided “irrefutable evidence” of India’s involvement in extrajudicial killings and transnational assassinations on Pakistani soil.
“India’s assertion of its preparedness to extra-judiciously execute more civilians, arbitrarily pronounced as ‘terrorists’, inside Pakistan constitutes a clear admission of culpability,” the FO said. “It is imperative for the international community to hold India accountable for its heinous and illegal actions.”
It added: “Pakistan stands resolute in its intent and ability to safeguard its sovereignty against any act of aggression, as demonstrated by its robust response to India’s reckless incursion in February 2019, which laid bare India’s hollow claims of military superiority.
The FO said that India’s ruling dispensation “habitually resort to hateful rhetoric to fuel hyper-nationalistic sentiments, unapologetically exploiting such discourse for electoral gains”, stressing that such “myopic and irresponsible behaviour” not only undermined regional peace but also impeded the prospects of constructive engagement in the long term.
“Pakistan has always demonstrated its commitment to peace in the region. However, our desire for peace should not be misconstrued. History attests to Pakistan’s firm resolve and ability to protect and defend itself,” it concluded.
Yesterday, the Foreign Office had said that the Indian network of extrajudicial and extraterritorial killings was now a “global phenomenon” that required a coordinated international response.
In the Friday statement, the FO had said that India’s assassination of Pakistani nationals on Pakistani soil was a clear violation of the country’s sovereignty and a breach of the UN Charter.
“These cases exposed the increasing sophistication and brazenness of Indian-sponsored terrorist acts inside Pakistan, with striking similarities to the pattern observed in other countries, including Canada and the United States,” the FO said.
“It is critical to bring to justice the perpetrators, facilitators, financiers and sponsors of these extrajudicial and extraterritorial killings. India must be held accountable internationally for its blatant violation of international law,” the FO had said.
Nine years ago, farmer Sultan Ahmed Bhatti gave up tilling the soil and using most fertilisers and pesticides on his farm in Doober Bhattian, Pakistan.
His brothers at first derided him. But soon, his first experiment with growing wheat on raised beds was a runaway success. “We produced more wheat than what we grew on ploughed, flat land,” he said.
Sultan Ahmed Bhatti discussing his farming techniques with visitors. Photo credit: Sukheki farms of Sultan Ahmed Bhatti
Today, researchers, climate experts, and agriculture students visit his 100-acre farm, where he grows wheat, rice, maize, sugarcane, and vegetables, to see how he is able to reap bumper crops with minimal input costs.
The magic is in the soil, says Bhatti, picking up a fistful of soil in his calloused hand. “It’s all about respecting the soil that treats you so well.”
Bhatti is among a small but growing segment of farmers across Pakistan and India pursuing “regenerative” farming techniques. It’s part of a global movement to make agriculture more sustainable by increasing soil health through cutting back on chemicals, adding organic material to soil, and diversifying plants and animals on the farm.
Experts see regenerative farming as a climate solution
Farmer Sultan Ahmed Bhatti’s first experiment of growing wheat on raised but measured beds on one acre of land was a runway success. “We produced more wheat than what we grew on ploughed, flat land,” he said. — Photo credit: Sukheki farms of Sultan Ahmed Bhatti
“Changing agricultural practices is the most straightforward way to benefit the planet’s health while ensuring food security in the long term,” said Francesco Carnevale Zampaolo, programme director at SRI-2030, a UK-based global organisation that promotes eco-friendly farming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance carbon sequestration.
Bio-agriculture scientist Dr Farooq-e-Azam, based in Faisalabad, Pakistan, has been promoting these methods since the early 1970s. He thinks that regenerative agriculture might be the key to addressing food insecurity and reducing intensive farming’s role in causing human-induced land degradation.
But there is no one-size-fits-all formula for transitioning to regenerative agriculture. It may require a different set of farming approaches depending on the soil type, weather conditions, and biodiversity. But generally, it means applying a range of techniques to restore the soil’s health.
These techniques include adding crop residue, composted manure, and natural rock minerals, says Azam, director of the Research and Development unit at US-based Bontera BioAg.
Illustration by Kulsum Ebrahim
Indian farmers turning to nature for solutions
The same is happening across the border, in India, too, where more farmers are shifting to a natural way of farming.
More than two decades ago, Samir Bordoloi quit his government job to become a farmer. Now, Bordoloi cultivates crops such as turmeric, jackfruit, papaya, and king chilies on nearly 12 acres of land in Sonapur, about 30km from Guwahati, a city in northeast India. The once-derelict ground that Bordoloi took on lease is a flourishing food forest today.
Bordoloi uses zero tillage and no pesticides or chemical fertilisers. Among other innovative techniques, Bordoloi scatters “seed bombs” on his land and lets them germinate naturally. For example, he plucks uniform sized ripened chillies and keeps them aside for seven days.
“Then we slice and take out their seeds and cover them with a mixture made of biochar, cow dung, and bamboo, which is then shaped into a ball.”
Is conventional farming sustainable?
Conventional farming in India and Pakistan has taken a toll on agricultural land. Around 30 per cent of the land in India is degraded, according to the National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning. More than 50pc of India’s farmers are debt-ridden, according to the 2019 National Statistical Office, and often seek alternatives outside of agriculture, or tragically, take their own lives.
In Pakistan, almost three-fourths of the land is degraded, according to Pakistan’s climate change ministry.
“Droughts, floods, deforestation, overgrazing, monoculture farming, excessive tillage, and the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides are the most glaring causes of land degradation on both sides of the fence,” said Dr Aamer Irshad, head of programme at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, in Pakistan.
Dr Vinod K. Chaudhary, an associate professor of sociology at Punjab University in Chandigarh, India, who is also a farmer, said farming methods in both countries are unsustainable.
While researching sustainable farming, he came across videos on YouTube and Facebook put up by Asif Sharif, a progressive farmer from Pakpattan, across the border in Pakistan’s Punjab province. “I learned plants require moisture, not water, which was the most difficult to believe, as we farmers believe in inundation.”
He also learned that soil should be covered, not tilled. Chaudhary decided to try Sharif’s techniques and found they worked well. Now he encourages farmers in Indian Punjab and Haryana to try them.
“The soil resets itself with this kind of farming,” Chaudhary said.
Experimenting and finding solutions
Regenerative farmers are experimenting and spreading the word.
Mahmood Nawaz Shah, a third-generation progressive farmer with 600 acres of farmland in Tando Allah Yar district of Sindh province, Pakistan, has adopted regenerative agricultural techniques “through hit and trial and finding solutions” now for 25 years.
Shah controls fruit flies on his 45-acre mango orchards through pheromone traps and lets parasites that eat borers loose in the sugarcane field.
“This allows us to delay pesticide sprays as late as possible as well as increase the intervals between two sprays,” he explains.
Shah also uses farmyard manure from livestock, grows peas, cauliflower, and black cumin amid 145 acres of sugarcane crop, and adds mineral-rich silt to his land.
“It has all been a gradual and experimental process,” he says.
Dhaniram Chetia, a farmer in the village of Pengeri in Tinsukia, in India’s Assam state, found an innovative way to keep insects off his harvest: He grows papaya, tomatoes, and bananas on 30pc of his eight acres of land to feed the local birds.
“The birds eat the pests that would otherwise prey on my cash crops. I don’t need to use insecticides,” he says.
Bordoloi in Assam says elephants have helped in turmeric farming.
“Elephants stamp on our turmeric plants, cut out the thatch and consume the green elephant grass after the rains; we barely need any labour,” he added.
Heaps of highly nutritious farmyard manure and silt from the river are spread to enrich and stabilise the soil’s pH levels, says Mahmood Nawaz Shah. Photo credit: Mahmood Nawaz Shah/IPS
Sugarcane waste, which otherwise was often burned, causing greenhouse gas emissions, is used to nourish the soil at Mahmood Nawaz Shah’s (right) farm. Photo credit: Mahmood Nawaz Shah/IPS
Does regenerative agriculture live up to the hype?
It’s hard to find definitive data on regenerative agriculture. Organic farming data may come closest. India has up to 2.66 million hectares of agricultural land under organic farming, according to the The World of Organic Agriculture 2023 yearbook, which places India among “countries with the most organic producers” alongside Uganda and Ethiopia. However, the data given by India’s department of agriculture and farmers welfare puts natural farming at just 0.65m hectares.
In Pakistan, the area under naturally organic agriculture in the country is about 1.51m hectares, or about 6pc of all agricultural land, according to the Pakistan Organic Association (POA), while land certified to be cultivated organically is just 64,885 hectares. “The government has not realised the virtues of this kind of farming and there is a complete absence of government policies and practices, particularly for organic food regulations and certification,” pointed out Dr Hasan Ali Mughal, founder of POA.
Further, 10pc of the landlords in Pakistan own 52pc of the land, where they prefer to carry out mono-cropping of wheat and rice, said the FAO spokesperson, Irshad. He predicted that regenerative agriculture “cannot become mainstream in Pakistan” due to poor soil conditions.
But soil revival using solutions from nature takes time, says Mohammad Zaman, 47, a farmer from Tando Jan Mohammad of Pakistan’s Sindh province’s Mirpurkhas district. He met with some initial resistance from his father when he decided to adopt a more “natural” way of farming on their 30 acres of mango orchards in 2017. But he has, so far, spared his 400 or so mango trees from all kinds of insecticides, fungicides, and pesticides. “I sell online and I’ve realised there is a growing demand for chemical-free fruits among consumers,” he said.
Seven years later, he is most satisfied. “I could not have chosen a better path for farming,” he said, as the soil fertility is even better than when his father was farming. He also grows ber, or Indian jujube, following the same principles.
“My water application is reduced by 50pc as the dead and live mulch cover keeps the land moist,” said Zaman, who also grows sugarcane and bananas. “We broke the myth that sugarcane and bananas are water guzzlers,” he said. He, however, uses fertiliser on the banana crop “sparingly” but intends to wean it off in two years.
This was endorsed by Indira Singh, lead at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the Indian Institute for Human Settlement (IIHS), in Bengaluru.
“Getting soil rejuvenation may take a little more time, but eventually, as the soil microbiomes bloom, they will see change, which will lead to a sustainable solution,” she said.
The once derelict ground that Bordoloi took on lease is now a flourishing food forest today in Sonapur, about 30 km from Guwahati city in Assam, India. Photo credit: Sanskrita Bharadwaj/IPS
Looking for larger solutions
Graphic credit: IPS
Graphic credit: IPS
Some would like to see more government support for regenerative farming.
Shah, currently the president of the Sindh Abadgar Board, an organisation of agriculturists in Sindh, said farmers are not being prepared for adapting to climate change and are not provided with solutions to counter those challenges.
Islamabad-based Dr M. Azeem Khan, former chairman of the Pakistan Agriculture Research Council, agreed. The governments, he said, will need to modify existing farm equipment, build new ones, and make them available, as most small farmers cannot afford them. Further, the state will need to build the technical capacity of its extension workers, who can not only convince but also train farmers to give up their “old ways” and to let nature take its course.
“Seeing is believing; only then will farmers accept change,” Khan said.
Khan said cheaper electricity, like solar, surety to procure produce, provision of timely and subsidised inputs, repair and maintenance of farm machinery, and an effective advocacy system focusing on how to move towards regenerative and environment-friendly agricultural practices would help.
“At the outset, the change may be costly,” but it is possible, he said.
This article was originally published as a part of a cross-border reporting workshop organised by the US-based East-West Center on Inter Press Service and has been reproduced with permission.
Header image: Farmer Samir Bordoloi showing a tea bud as he stands amidst his tea shrubs. He cultivates various crops such as turmeric, jackfruit, papaya and king chilies on nearly 12 acres of land. Bordoloi calls himself a “compassionate farmer”, and believes in zero tillage, no pesticides and chemical fertilisers. Photo credit: Sanskrita Bharadwaj/IPS
Rescuers in Taiwan faced the threat of further landslides and rockfalls in their search on Friday for a dozen people still missing from this week’s earthquake, as the death toll rose to 12 and some of the stranded were brought to safety.
Searchers discovered two more bodies after Wednesday’s quake of magnitude 7.2 struck the sparsely populated, largely rural eastern county of Hualien, stranding hundreds in a national park as boulders barrelled down mountains, cutting off roads.
As some 50 aftershocks rattled the area overnight, some felt as far away as Taipei, rescuers said about 400 people cut off in a luxury hotel in the Taroko Gorge national park were safe, with helicopters ferrying out the injured and bringing supplies.
“Rain increases the risks of rockfalls and landslides, which are currently the biggest challenges,” said Su Yu-ming, the leader of a search team helping the rescue effort.
“These factors are unpredictable, which means we cannot confirm the number of days required for the search and rescue operations.”
Taiwan’s fire department said two bodies were found in the mountains, but did not immediately update the death toll. It put the number of missing at 18, three of them foreigners of Australian and Canadian nationality.
It dropped from the list of missing an Indian national whose inclusion it called a mistake, but did not elaborate.
A group of 50 hotel workers marooned on a road to the national park are now mostly safe.
“I am lucky to survive,” said David Chen, 63, a security manager at the hotel, after his rescue. “We were terrified when the earthquake first happened. We thought it was all over, all over, all over, because it was an earthquake, right?”
Rocks were still tumbling down nearby slopes as the group left, he added. “We had to navigate through the gaps between the falling rocks, with the rescue team out front.”
Chen’s 85-year-old mother wept in relief on being reunited with her son, as the family had not known for some time if he had survived.
“I was happy when he returned,” said the mother, Chen Lan-chih. “I didn’t sleep at all last night and couldn’t eat anything.”
The quake came a day before Taiwan began a long weekend holiday for the traditional tomb sweeping festival when people head to their homes to spruce up ancestral graves.
Many others visit tourist spots, like Hualien, famed for its rugged beauty, but the earthquake has crushed business, with many bookings cancelled, some businesses said.
“This is a disaster actually for us because no matter (whether) hotel, hostel, restaurants (everything) really depends on tourism,” said hostel owner Aga Syu, adding that her main concern was the well-being of guests.
“I hope this won’t destroy their image of Hualien.”
Taiwan lies near the junction of two tectonic plates and is prone to earthquakes. More than 100 people were killed in a 2016 quake in its south, while one of magnitude 7.3 killed more than 2,000 in 1999.
LAHORE: An anti-terrorism court on Thursday granted post-arrest bail to 39 activists of the PTI in a case of attacking Lahore corps commander’s residence, also known as Jinnah House, during May 9 riots.
Judge Arshad Javed allowed the bail petitions of the jailed activists subject to furnishing of surety bonds of Rs100, 000.
Those granted bail include Shan Ali, Nadir Mahmood, Awais Ali, Yar Gul, Waqar Jamil, Zeeshan Butt, Kashif Khan, Awn Abbas, Naqeeb Ahmad, Riaz Ahmad and Tasawur Hussain.
Lawyers for the activists mainly argued that they had not committed any illegal act.
They said the police have failed to produce any evidence establishing charges against the petitioners. They said the investigation rather showed the petitioners were peaceful participants of a political march.
The counsel said the police levelled general accusations against the petitioners without attributing any specific role to them.
They further argued that the petitioners were not nominated in the FIR and police implicated them at a later stage without conducting identification parade of the suspects.
They pointed out that many suspects having similar roles had already been released on bail and, therefore, the rule of consistency was applicable to these petitioners also.
Sarwar Road police had registered FIR No 96 against PTI leaders and workers on charges of attacking and vandalising the Jinnah House during the May 9 violent protests which had erupted after the arrest of former prime minister Imran Khan in a graft case by NAB from the Islamabad High Court.
Over the last two months, over 200 male and female activists of PTI have been granted bail in the Jinnah House attack by different trial courts.
Besides terrorism charges under Section 7 of the Anti-Tterrorism Act, 1997, various offences were added to the FIR.
I start with a simple premise that seems to have been forgotten during the intellectual gymnastics at play — judges should always be independent.
Our legal canon has led to the sacrifice of many trees to fill law books with pages exalting the independence of the judiciary, for independent judges are impartial, and impartial judges promote justice. Ergo: impartiality must always be safeguarded.
An incentive that undergirds such impartiality is a judge’s desire to avoid harsh consequences for the decisions they render. Threatening a judge with coercive measures may compel them to decide a particular case a particular way. If we accept the absurdly-simple premise I started with, such pressure is, obviously, undesirable for society, meriting an immediate response to curb the menace.
Not so simple
This is a simple enough notion, until it’s not, as shown by the polemics on the six Islamabad High Court Justices’ alarming description of interference in their judicial functions — allegations that should perturb every citizen, but which are being tactfully dismissed by framing the debate around the timing of the reveal. “Why now?” critics ask, when confronted with the shocking material in the Justices’ letter to the SJC. “Where was this courage when Justice Shaukat Siddiqui was targeted?” they ask, equally rhetorically, in response to praise meted to the Justices, for the latter’s attempt to stand by their oaths.
Those who read diligently, and enjoy craniums free of tinfoil hats, need only peruse paragraph six of the Justices’ letter to observe that their contentions did not originate overnight. It appears that, by May 3, 2023, both the Chief Justice of the Islamabad High Court and the Chief Justice of Pakistan had been apprised of the Justices’ objections.
The letter details follow-up meetings. Nothing came of them, until the apex court took cognisance of the matter (more on this later).
Those deriding the Justices for not taking a stand for Justice Siddiqui, perhaps conveniently, ignore the fact that five of the six judges were not even on the bench in 2018. Information available on the subject does not show that any of the six opposed Justice Siddiqui’s cause, so any apathy to Justice Siddiqui’s plight cannot be inferred.
The situation, today, is materially different — five of these six Justices are no longer private persons, but constitutional office-holders, tasked with dispensing justice. This captures how the debate on timing only obfuscates the thornier issue — do we displace our preference for judicial impartiality, if we accept the premise that the Justices were not active enough in condemning what came before? Would one’s perception of the adequacy of their earlier response be the metric for determining whether the Justices may seek insulation from intimidation?
Surely not. We want judges to only be guided by their conscience and intellect when they issue verdicts. Therefore, an attack on their independence should elicit consternation, and not cynicism.
Plenty of reasons have been provided for the former, all rooted in the Justices’ inability to, individually, counter the invasion of their privacy or the torture of their loved ones. The law on contempt does not permit the Justices to initiate contempt proceedings where they are parties to the dispute; the law only permits the Justices to “refer” the matter to the chief justice, and this referral, by the Justices, did not bear fruit.
The code of conduct too does not prescribe a mechanism for reporting the executive’s meddling in the Justices’ sphere of operation.
Pen in a sword fight
When Justice Siddiqui spoke out, the SJC found him guilty of misconduct for breaching the same code; his six-year legal battle culminated only in “benefits and privileges of a retired Judge”. Justice Siddiqui’s exoneration did, however, demonstrate the extent of executive intrusion in the judiciary’s affairs, reaching the point where a nation-wide reckoning within the institution is necessary to formulate a coherent push-back strategy.
Armed only with the pen in a sword-fight with the executive, the Justices, recognising their limitations, now seek such “institutional consultation” among their brethren.
Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani agreed with this approach, opting to recuse himself from the prime minister’s one-man inquiry commission; safeguarding his legacy in the process, he posits that the matter is best left to the SJC or the Supreme Court.
With the one-man inquiry commission having lost its only man, the committee constituted under Section 3 of the Supreme Court (Practice and Procedure) Act, 2023, ended up agreeing with Justice Jillani. Out came the notification that the Supreme Court is taking suo motu notice of the matter, leading to the first hearing on Wednesday, April 3.
The high courts’ inability to immunise against executive overreach, naturally, trickles down to the lower courts, where judges are more susceptible than their high court counterparts. This vulnerability affects litigants throughout the system, which should concern us.
Impressive though the Justices’ crusade to uphold their oath has been, being forced to fight this fight at all should concern us. And the fact that — even when truth is being spoken to power — some of us have conveniently forgotten first principles, regardless of how intuitive these principles may be, should concern us.
Some of these concerns appear to have registered with the Supreme Court. Wednesday’s hearing contained multiple references to the “independence of the judiciary” and the need to determine “the way forward”, for which a full bench of the court may hear the rest of the case.
During the hearing, the CJP poignantly remarked that the proceedings would prompt listeners to open law books and read them carefully enough. Solely dusting off the treatises, however, may not be enough; as plenty quote, “justice must not only be done, but should also be seen to be done”.
