Last week, Asma Jahangir was elected to head Pakistan’s Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA), the leading professional organization for the country’s lawyers. She is a very skilled broker and a committed human rights lawyer (she is United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief) and will add a much needed counter force to the increasingly politicized judiciary that is destabilizing the current political system.
We don’t often hear good news from Pakistan these days and it’s easy to forget that there are still some powerful and influential liberal forces in the country. Asma is the real deal and her election is good news. She has a tough (and dangerous) road ahead — the future and strength of Pakistan’s democratic institutions rest on the legitimacy and integrity of its institutional checks and balances and a professional and independent judiciary — but the lawyers movement that she now leads has shown that it can play a significant role in constraining political excesses. I wish her well….
Jon Western has spent the last fifteen years teaching IR in liberal arts colleges at Mount Holyoke College and the Five Colleges in western Massachusetts. He has an eclectic range of intellectual interests but often writes on international security, U.S. foreign policy, military intervention, and human rights. He occasionally shares his thoughts about professional life in liberal arts colleges. In his spare time he coaches middle school soccer, mentors the local high school robotics team, skis, and sails.
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