Pakistan has so often been a miasma of uncertainty, impunity, coercion and violence that it is worth applauding the Supreme Court’s determination to see this case to a difficult but necessary conclusion.
Source/Credit: The Washington Post
By Editorial Board | July 30, 2017
ONCE AGAIN, Pakistanis are being reminded of an unfortunate pattern. In the nation’s 70-year history, not one prime minister has served out a full five-year term. They have been thrown out by military coups and dismissed by judges. The latest example came Friday, when Pakistan’s Supreme Court disqualified — essentially dismissed — Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on grounds that he had lied to the nation about his family’s wealth and financial dealings.
The ouster does seem to be another chapter in Pakistan’s seemingly endless flirtation with state failure and chaos. But not so fast. The court’s action suggests it managed to extract some accountability in a sea of corruption and arbitrariness.
Mr. Sharif, who served as prime minister in the 1990s before being ousted by a military coup, was elected in 2013 with a sizeable margin. He has struggled to respond to Pakistan’s economic woes. But his undoing was set in motion in April 2016, by publication of the Panama Papers, more than 11.5 million leaked files published by an international consortium of investigative journalists. The papers included nearly four decades of data from a law firm based in Panama, Mossack Fonseca, that disclosed a web of offshore transactions by political leaders around the world.
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