{ prima facie } the Temple Law newspaper

By Matthew Pillischer

The National Lawyers Guild held its 2008 Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference on March 1 at Drexel University. Over two hundred lawyers, students (including many Temple NLGers), legal workers, and community members attended from the region.

Workshops ranged in topics from immigrant workers’ rights and racial discrimination in America, to the housing and lending crisis, to the effect of the Bush administration’s policies on the legal system.

The conference ended with “The Rule of Law and the Pakistani Lawyers’ Movement: Then and Now,” with Sahibzada Anwar Hamid and Hamid Khan, both lawyers and Senior Advocates for the Supreme Court of Pakistan. The speakers addressed the history of U.S. intervention in the region, reported on recent actions of Musharraf, and advocated for “the supremacy of law, the revival of the judiciary, and the revival of the constitution in its original form.”

Hamid and Khan spoke of the sacrifices the movement has given, including mass detentions and violence.

“District police officers hurled flammable liquid on the lawyers because they were organizing for the return of the rule of law and an independent judiciary. The president of the Supreme Court bar association is still under house arrest,” they said.

Photographs of the burned and beaten lawyers circulated the audience.

The speakers thanked the NLG for its solidarity with the Pakistani lawyers’ movement and said, “We are grateful to the NLG for sending lawyers on a fact-finding mission…the report is quite encouraging.”

An NLG delegation made up of four lawyers and four law students visited Pakistan from January 2 -12, 2008. Delegation members went to Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and Islamabad, where they conducted interviews with more than fifty judges, lawyers, government officials, journalists, and other members of Pakistani civil society.

The speakers ended their inspiring stories about Pakistan’s struggle for justice with an international call: “The lawyer community throughout the world is one family. Wherever there is a violation of human rights, lawyers should respond.”

The NLG delegation findings can be viewed at www.nlg.org/pakistan.