Ministers rubbish notion that proposed retirement age extension to favour ‘one particular institution’

Information Minister Attaullah Tarar on Tuesday rubbished the notion that a proposed extension in the retirement age was to favour “one particular institution”, adding that the move would be implemented across the board if approved.

The rebuttal comes in the wake of media reports claiming that the government was mulling changes to the Constitution to fix the tenure of the chief justice. Currently, judges of the Supreme Court, including the chief justice, retire after attaining the age of superannuation, i.e. 65 years, as stipulated in Article 179 of the Constitution.

While giving his opinion recently on the reports of the constitutional amendment, Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar had said he “will not vehemently turn down the proposals related to the tenure of the chief justice”.

Addressing the issue during a press conference in Islamabad today along since Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb and the law minister, Attaullah said the extension in the retirement age was “a proposal to apply to all institutions [and not] as per speculation in the media since the past few weeks that it is being associated with one particular institution”.

The information minister said that life expectancy had increased worldwide and various countries had increased the retirement age. He explained that pensions were a huge burden and expense on the government.

He said the proposed extension would apply across the board in all institutions and departments whenever it was approved. “Currently proposals have been requested on the issue and it is being deliberated,” he added.

Aurangzeb also said that pension payments were a huge burden on the economy which needed to be restructured and proposed that the retirement age should be increased to 65 years.

The law minister also said that the pension reforms would be across the board and there was no clarity as of yet on how much the retirement age should be increased by.

However, he said a principled decision was made to curb the pension burden on the government to allow “breathing space”. Azam added that the move would apply to all institutions, civil servants, armed forces, judicial organs and executive organs.

He said a committee was set up by the prime minister to discuss the measure.

The PTI has said it will oppose any amendment to the Constitution that would modify the tenure of judges, calling such changes “person-specific” to benefit the incumbent chief justice.

This was not the first time that reports about changes in the duration of superior courts judges started making rounds. There have been attempts in the past to amend the Constitution for this purpose.

On October 1, 2019, when PTI was in po­­wer, its two lawmakers — Fakhar Imam and Amjad Khan Niazi — moved a private bill in the National Assembly to raise the retirement age of apex court judges to 68 years.

At that time, Asif Saeed Khosa was the chief justice.

However, the swirling speculation died down when Khosa retired after attaining the age of superannuation in December and was succeeded by Gulzar Ahmed as the country’s top adjudicator.

Any change to the tenure of Supreme Court judges will require a constitutional amendment, for which the votes of two-thirds of the members are needed in both the Senate and the NA.

It means that in the 336-member NA, the votes of 224 members would be needed to pass the amendment. The current coalition has two-thirds majority in the lower house, as per the information available on the National Assembly website.

The two-thirds strength in the 96-member Senate comes to 64.

After the April 2 elections, the ruling coalition controls 59 seats in the house.

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