Justice Khawaja takes oath as chief justice

ISLAMABAD – President Mamnoon Hussain on Monday administered the oath to Justice Jawwad S. Khawaja as the chief justice of Pakistan.

The ceremony held here at the Aiwan-e-Sadr – was attended by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, federal ministers Ishaq Dar and Pervaiz Rashid, the judges, the Senate chairman, the parliamentarians, the services chiefs and senior officials.

The president and the prime minister felicitated the chief justice on assuming the office. He succeeds Justice Nasirul Mulk – who retired on Sunday, August 16.

About Chief Justice Jawwad S. Khawaja

He was born in Wazirabad in 1950, and was educated at the Mission School in Wazirabad, Lawrence College Ghora Gali near Murree, Aitchison College in Lahore and Forman Christian College in Lahore. He did his LL.B. at the Punjab University Law College and his LL.M. from the University of California, Berkeley. He started his legal practice as an advocate of the Lahore High Court in 1975 and was a partner at Cornelius, Lane and Mufti, one of the largest law firms in Pakistan.In 1999, he became a judge of the Lahore High Court but resigned in 2007 in response to the maltreatment of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on 9 March. He joined the Law and Policy Department of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in August 2007 and served as the head of department from October 2007 to May 2009, when he joined the Supreme Court of Pakistan.

Some of the important Supreme Court decisions Justice Khawaja has been part of include: the SHCBA case, in which the Court declared the Emergency imposed by President General Pervez Musharraf on 3 November 2007 to be unconstitutional and restored most of the judges who were forced to vacate office that day; the NRO case, in which the Supreme Court declared the National Reconciliation Ordinance to be void ab initio (Justice Khawaja wrote a concurrent opinion);and the Makro-Habib case, in which the Court ordered the wholesale giant Makro-Habib (and its patron Army Welfare Trust) to restore the playground in Sadr Karachi on which it had established its outlet (Justice Khawaja wrote the leading opinion).

Source Wikipedia.