Pressure is mounting on Pakistan from all directions. First it was suspended from the Commonwealth earlier today, by a majority vote. Now the UN has called for Pakistan to release the Judges currently under house arrest, before it goes to polls.Reuters reports:
Earlier in the day the Supreme Court, now stacked with judges friendly to Musharraf, threw out the last challenge to his October 6 re-election and paved the way for him to quit as army chief.
Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and a former prosecutor for international criminal tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda, said Pakistan faced a "terrible deficit in governance" without a free judiciary.
"It is not enough to move towards free and fair elections unless all the judges who were dismissed or suspended are fully reinstated in their previous capacity," she told reporters in Dublin.
"Otherwise we will have a very twisted form of democracy where the judicial branch will have been made totally subservient to the executive," she said on the sidelines of a human rights conference.
Despite the President's assertion on the contrary, with a second Commonwealth suspension in tow, it increasingly appears that, Pakistan is heading to the where we had started from in 1999.
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