Govt rushes bills in NA on strength of Supreme Court judges, 5-year tenure of services chiefs – Pakistan

The National Assembly on Monday passed six bills, including one seeking an increase in the number of Supreme Court judges and another related to the extension of the terms of armed services chiefs, shortly after they were presented as the opposition strongly protested.

The first bill — Supreme Court (Practice and Procedure) (Amendment) Act, 2024 — related to the increase in the number of top court judges, was presented by Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar, who said that the government had proposed increasing the number of judges to 34.

“This amendment will increase the number of judges in the Supreme Court up to 34, so that the backlog of cases can be cleared, and that after the 26th amendment, we can have judges to form the constitutional benches,” Tarar said.

“Our bar lobbies and the SCBA (Supreme Court Bar Association) have been recommending this for a while now so that the four-bar court registries in Karachi, Quetta, Peshawar, and Lahore can relieve their thousands of pending cases. This number has been left open for the judicial commission,” the minister went on to say.

Soon after the law minister presented the bill in the assembly and finished his speech, voting on the bill was carried out despite the opposition fiercely protesting.

The NA also passed amendments to the Pakistan (Army/Air Force/Navy) Act Amendment Bill 2024 to increase the tenures of service chiefs, presented by Defense Minister Khawaja Asif.

The proposed bill to amend the Army Act, the Pakistan Army (Amendment) Act, 2024, aims to extend the tenure of the Chief of Army Staff from three to five years.

“In the said Act, in section 8A, in sub-section (1), for the expression “three (03)” the word “five (05)” shall be substituted,” says the bill. Sub-section 1 of Section 8A states that “the President shall, on the advice of the Prime Minister, appoint a General as the Chief of the Army Staff, for a tenure of three (03) years.”

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