Daily Times

The Judicial Com­mis­sion of Pakistan (JCP) on Thursday approved the elevation of Justice Ayesha A. Malik to the Supreme Court. She is poised to become the first woman judge at the apex court.

Justice Malik will be the first woman judge in Pakistan’s history to be elevated to the top court. She has been a Lahore High Court judge since March 27. According to her profile on the Lahore High Court’s website, she did her B.Com from the Government College of Commerce and Economics, Karachi and studied law at Lahore’s Pakistan College of Law. She completed her LLM from Harvard Law School, where she was named London H Gammon Fellow 1999-1999.

And the nomination needs to be endorsed by the Parliamentary Committee on Appointment of Judges, which is considered a formality. In September last year, the JCP had met to consider her nomination but consensus could not be developed among the members.

Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed, Justice Umar Ata Bandial, Attorney General for Pakistan (AGP) Khalid Jawed Khan, and Law Minister Dr Farogh Naseem had supported her nomination, while Justice Maqbool Baqar, Justice Sardar Tariq Masood, and Justice (retd) Dost Muhammad Khan and Pakistan Bar Council representative Akhtar Hussain had opposed it.

Chief Justice of Pakistan Gulzar Ahmed had again proposed Justice Malik’s name for her elevation in the Supreme Court. Justice Malik became a Lahore High Court judge in March 2012 and is currently number four on the LHC judge seniority list. After her elevation to the apex court, she will work as a Supreme Court judge until June 2031.

Earlier this week, the top bodies of lawyers, unanimously, decided to boycott the top court’s proceedings on January 6, 2022, if the Judicial Commission of Pakistan (JCP) did not recall its scheduled meeting to recommend the elevation of Justice Ayesha Malik to the apex court.

Vice-chairman PBC Khushdil Khan, along with the Council’s Executive Committee Chairman Masood Chisti, on Monday briefed the media about the decision of the meeting, which was participated by the representatives of the Pakistan Bar Council (PBC), the provincial/Islamabad Bar Councils, the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA), and all the high court bar associations of the country.