QUETTA, Pakistan, 2 April 2008 — Pakistan’s deposed chief justice claimed yesterday he was still the legal head of the Supreme Court and hailed the election defeat of President Pervez Musharraf’s allies as the end of “one-man rule.” Pakistan’s new government has pledged to reinstate within a month about 60 senior judges purged by Musharraf last year, raising the prospect of a showdown with the US-backed president.

In his first prepared speech since his release from house arrest last week, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry insisted his removal during emergency rule in November was illegal and denounced those who then accepted positions at the court as illegitimate.

The judges, who refused to take a fresh oath of office during the emergency “claim that we are all the judges of the courts, and those people who took the oath... are not legal and constitutional judges,” Chaudhry told a gathering of lawyers in Quetta.

He said the results of February parliamentary elections “changed the country’s culture.”

“Who did this? This is done by you people and the people of the country. The message is clear that in future everything will be constitutional in the country and there will be no more one-man rule,” Chaudhry said.

The parties of assassinated opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif swept to power in elections supposed to complete Pakistan’s return to democracy after eight years of military rule.

Musharraf purged the Supreme Court to prevent it from ruling on the legality of his receiving a new five-year term while he was still in uniform. If restored, the judges could revisit the issue.

Musharraf’s power has been on the wane since he first tried to remove Chaudhry a year ago, sparking mass protests by lawmakers that galvanized the country’s weak and divided opposition parties.

Bhutto’s assassination in December contributed to the ruling party’s heavy defeat and left the president so weakened that even his longtime US allies have distanced themselves from him in public.

On Monday, Musharraf looked tense as he swore in a 24-member Cabinet during a short, joyless ceremony in the presidential palace in the capital Islamabad. Three ministers from Sharif’s party wore black armbands in protest at taking the oath from the former military strongman.