ABA Expresses Solidarity With Pakistani Lawyers
The ABA’s 555-member policy-making House of Delegates passed a measure late this afternoon expressing solidarity with Pakistani lawyers and judges who have been persecuted by their government after protesting suspension of the Pakistani constitution by President Pervez Musharraf.
Resolution 10D passed by a unanimous voice vote—the only vote without even a single dissent today.
The ABA sponsored a protest march in Washington, D.C., in November after a number of Pakistani judges and lawyers were detained or placed under house arrest.
Kathryn Grant Madigan, president of the New York State Bar Association and a partner at Levene Gouldin & Thompson in Vestal, N.Y., told the House “we must send a message that we stand with the Pakistani legal community.”
Mark Alcott, a former president of the New York State Bar Association and a partner at Manhattan’s Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, said that “in Pakistan, the oppression is targeting, in particular, lawyers, judges and bar associations.” The survival of the country’s independent judiciary “hangs in the balance.”
