Pakistanijudge becomes hero for defying general

ISLAMABAD, July 20 (Reuters) When the government charged Pakistan's Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry with misconduct and suspended him, it seriously underestimated his refusal to be cowed.

By resisting pressure to resign from President Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence chiefs, the 58-year-old policeman's son became a hero for many of his countrymen.

''He has always been confident that he was fighting for justice,'' Ali Ahmed Kurd, a member of his legal team, told Reuters.

''Throughout this judicial struggle, we never saw him lose hope.'' Today, he won his fight. A 13-member bench of the Supreme Court reinstated Chaudhry, who had been suspended on March 9, and threw out the government's accusations against him.

Stung by the treatment of the country's top judge, lawyers had mobilised a nationwide movement to protect the independence of the judiciary, though many had been irked by his treatment of them in court.

Opposition parties joined the Chaudhry bandwagon, turning a judicial crisis into a political one, only months before end-year elections.

Chaudhry remained impassive while all around chanted slogans like ''Go, Musharraf, Go'' and his lawyers ripped into the government and the army's interference in politics.

In speeches to lawyers' forums round the country in the months after his suspension, Chaudhry avoided direct attacks on Musharraf.

''I have nothing to do with politics,'' he told lawyers in the central city of Multan last month, saying he was a judge and wanted to remain a judge.

Instead, he defended principles of democracy like the separation of powers, and warned that history had shown military governments could never last. Pakistan has been ruled by generals for more than half its 60 years as a nation.

YOUNGEST CHIEF JUSTICE Chaudhry was born a year after Pakistan was carved out of the partition of India in 1947. He grew up in the southwest city of Quetta and became a lawyer in 1974, a Supreme Court judge in 2000, and the youngest ever chief justice in June 2005.

The speed with which he dealt with cases to clear backlogs in courts hardly endeared him to lawyers who charge by the hour.

But when the government was perceived to have attacked the institution and not just the man, lawyers rushed to his defence.

''I've known him since 1977, when I joined this profession, and from that day to today, he was a very, very hard worker,'' lawyer Tariq Mehmud told Reuters after Chaudhry's suspension.

Chaudhry took on human rights cases, confronted police excesses and made the government accountable for people who had gone missing after Pakistan joined the U.S.-led ''war on terror'' in 2001.

A ruling that seriously upset the government was in June last year, when he blocked the sale of state-run Pakistan Steel Mills, citing ''omission and commissions on the part of certain state functionaries'' that violated the law.

He also blocked a big property development in a scenic area near Islamabad that was backed by powerful politicians but opposed by environmentalists, and thwarted a province's attempt to set up a Taliban-style religious police force.

Analysts say Musharraf's move to sack Chaudhry may have been motivated by fears that the independent-minded judge might block his political plans.

Dedicated to the law and to his wife and four children, Chaudhry has few outside interests.

REUTERS RN PM0001