Asif Khosa sworn in as Pakistan’s new chief justice

ISLAMABAD: Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khosa was sworn in as Pakistan’s new Supreme Court chief justice on Friday at a ceremony attended by top civilian and military leaders, diplomats and foreign dignitaries.
President Dr. Arif Alvi administered oath to the country’s top judge before an audience that included Prime Minister Imran Khan, Army Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa and other top government and military officials.
“I will do right to all manner of people, according to law, without fear or favor,” Khosa said as he read out the oath.
The incoming chief justice is known as a competent and proficient judge, and has decided around 55,000 cases in a career spanning over two decades long career.
“The legal fraternity expects him [Khosa] to devise a permanent mechanism to clear backlog of around 1.9 million cases pending in the courts as justice delayed is justice denied,” said Habibullah Khan, a senior lawyer of Supreme Court, adding that unlike his predecessor who had cultivated a reputation for judicial activism, Khosa would act as a more classical judge.
At outgoing chief justice Mian Saqib Nisar’s full court reference on Thursday, Justice Khosa said that he would try his best to remove delays in the disposition of cases at all levels of the judicial hierarchy.
In reference to the outgoing chief justice’s crusade to raise funds to build dams in Pakistan, Khosa said on Thursday: “I would also like to build some dams, a dam against undue and unnecessary delays in judicial determination of cases, a dam against frivolous litigation and a dam against fake witnesses and false testimonies and would also try to retire a debt, the debt of pending cases which must be decided at the earliest possible.”
Khosa said that he was aware of the problems in the judicial system, “but I may assure you that no stone shall be left unturned in attending to such issues and in trying to improve the situation.”
Khosa is known to have a penchant for literary quotations and began the 2017 verdict in the Panama Papers case with the line “Behind every great fortune there is a crime” from the popular 1969 novel, “The Godfather,” by Mario Puzo.
Khosa headed the bench that upheld the death penalty for Mumtaz Qadri who murdered Punjab governor Salman Taseer in 2015 for supporting a woman wrongly accused of blasphemy, and was also part of the bench that acquitted a poor, Christian woman in a landmark blasphemy case after eight years on death row.
Khosa will retire on December 21 this year.

Asif Khosa sworn in as Pakistan’s new chief justice