Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has created a political prisoner out of an eight-year-old boy whose only fault is that he happens to be the youngest child of detained Pakistan Chief Justice Ifthikar Muhammad Chaudhry.Eight-year-old Balaaj is subject to the same draconian restrictions that have restricted his parents and two siblings to within the walls of their home in Islamabad for the past several months.Details of Balaaj’s incarceration have been revealed by former cabinet minister and lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan, President of Pakistan’s Supreme Court Bar Association.The Cambridge-educated Ahsan, who said in an exclusive interview that his finest professional moment came when the Chief Justice talked of retaining him as his lawyer, says the house arrest conditions are so severe that Chaudhry and his family are locked up inside their house, effectively making it a sub-jail.“As many as 10 Supreme Court judges are presently detained in house arrest”. Ahsan explained. “The issue with the Chief Justice is that he’s been locked up inside the building of his house. It’s a large house, no doubt, but the children are not allowed to come out into the verandah, or even for the winter sun of Islamabad. It’s a terrible thing for four and a half months. I am sure it gets terribly claustrophobic.”For Balaaj, “there is no question of school, not even the front lawn or the verandah of the house, school is a way off distance.”Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, leaders of the two main political parties that have pledged to work together in a coalition government after the recent elections, have pledged to release Chaudhry once the new government is in place. They have asked for 30 days to release the Chief Justice and the judges, promising that the Chief Justice is their first priority.But for the time being, at least until a new government is sworn in, Chaudhry remains at Musharraf’s mercy. Musharraf has not forgiven him for questioning the role of the ISI and other security agencies in kidnapping and holding so-called terrorist suspects incommunicado for months on end. Chaudhry is also among the Supreme Court judges who do not believe that Musharraf had the right to have himself “re-elected”.“I have been calling out that the domestic and international media and the domestic and international supporters of Pervez Musharraf should consider the crimes he is committing”, Ahsan declared. These are private jails he has created, but this is something to which the international community is not listening. They are so much in love with Musharraf, even condoning his crime.“This is happening in South Asia. I thought we were a South Asian muslim country - not an Arab Middle Eastern country, and that we believed in the rule of law.”In London Human Rights Watch Asia Director Brad Adams commented, “Musharraf has persecuted the Chief Justice and in so doing has made a de facto political prisoner of his son."
