As representatives of the fourth pillar of Pakistan’s democratic state, we, the members of the media, feel that the honourable judges must not entertain petitions that are quite clearly politically-motivated. These belong to a genre of pleas usually filed in the name of public interest, though they’re mostly furthering the interest of a private party. Another issue invoked in these petitions is that of contempt of court, which is a quite serious matter and must not be trivialised by trying to expand its domain to opinions that are quite clearly not in contempt of court, and are frequently meant to serve as constructive criticism on court judgements. We can count on our fingertips the lawyers and the groups that engage in these kinds of litigations that – more often than not – lack legal and constitutional vigour to withstand more than a couple of hearings. The most recent example of such pleas is the one filed by this Lahore-based gentleman, Advocate Azhar Siddique. He has held that Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi delivered an ‘anti-judiciary’ speech during his trip to Sialkot. The petitioner specifically referred to the PM’s comment on the Panama Leaks decision. The court has already summoned responses from the PM’s Office among other respondents. We know, and we’re sure the honourable judges do as well, that it will require an unreasonably expansive interpretation of Article 204 of the Constitution to deem comments on judgements, no matter how dismissive these may be, as acts in contempt of court. Such an interpretation will severely limit the scope of constitutional rights of Pakistani citizens and their elected representatives. The honourable judges will be best advised to not dignify with a hearing pleas that misrepresent the public and its interest and fall short of constitutional requirements. The PM’s comments on Panama Leaks case are clearly lacking in propriety, but one would have to stretch the meaning of contempt [in Article 204] to an extent that it will run us the risk of infringing on other constitutional rights of the people. In any democracy worth its name, this kind of a trade off must always be settled in the interest of basic constitutional rights. The honourable judges can trust the fourth pillar of the democratic republic to take the elected representatives to task for lack of decorum and politeness. Meanwhile, they can use their precious time for issues truly concerned with public interest like agrarian land reforms, affordable housing policy, student unions ban, and others. * Published in Daily Times, January 15th 2018.