Justice Waqar Ahmad Seth, who has died after contracting coronavirus, was an outspoken judge of a kind rarely seen in Pakistan and an unlikely source of opposition to the powerful military.
Tributes described him as bold, fearless and independent. He was 59.
As chief justice of Peshawar High Court (PHC), he passed judgments that angered both the military and the government – including a death sentence on exiled former ruler General Pervez Musharraf that made headlines around the world.
He also challenged the establishment on human rights abuses, striking down a law under which the military ran secret internment centres, and acquitting dozens of people convicted under anti-terrorism laws for lack of evidence.
Justice Seth’s death is being seen as a major setback in a country where the military has been expanding its influence again in recent years.
Lawyers around the country have been in mourning since his death in an Islamabad hospital on 13 November.
The secretary-general of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), Harris Khalique, called his death a “great blow to a judiciary struggling to be independent in Pakistan’s quasi democracy”.
Mr Khalique told the BBC that Justice Seth represented the tradition of “conscientious and fearless judges… who unfortunately always remained in a minority”.
Former senator Afrasiab Khatak said in a tweet that Justice Seth’s stature was raised not just by the list of his remarkable judgments, “but also the oppressive conditions that required courage for writing such judgments”.
Supreme Court Bar Association president Abdul Latif Afridi described him as “a courageous and uncompromising” person who didn’t shy away from a fight with the military.
“And he paid a personal price,” Mr Afridi told Dawn newspaper, recalling that the Peshawar chief justice had been denied elevation to the Supreme Court three times despite his seniority.
Justice Seth made history when the three-member special court he headed sentenced Gen Musharraf to death last year in absentia. The general had been found guilty of treason for suspending the constitution and imposing emergency rule in 2007.
It was the first time the treason clause in the constitution been applied to anyone, far less to a top military official by a civil court in a country where the military has controlled political decision-making for most of the time since its independence from British rule in 1947.
The penalty was unlikely to be carried out. Gen Musharraf, who has always denied any wrongdoing, had been allowed to leave Pakistan in 2016 on medical grounds.
The ruling allowed for this, saying if he died before he could be executed his corpse should be dragged outside parliament in Islamabad and “hanged for three days”.
There was outrage, with the government seeking to disbar Justice Seth for being unfit for office, and legal experts calling the instructions unconstitutional
