Former City Bar President
Former New York State Supreme Court Judge
Aidala, Bertuna & Kamins, PC

One of my proudest moments during my tenure as City Bar President occurred on November 13, 2007. On that day, the City Bar sponsored a rally on the steps of 60 Centre Street to support attorneys in Pakistan who had been jailed or placed under house arrest after Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf declared emergency rule.

As a result of the emergency declaration, Musharraf suspended the constitution and replaced seven of the eleven justices on Pakistan’s Supreme Court, including its Chief Justice. According to press reports, thousands of lawyers protesting the imposition of emergency rule were arrested and hundreds were beaten.

One of the speakers at the rally was Ali Ashan, whose father was president of Pakistan’s Supreme Court Bar Association and who was the lawyer for the opposition parties that contested General Musharrafs re-election before the Supreme Court. Ashan, who was a former associate at Clearly, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton LLP, told those in attendance that the military had been imprisoning bar group leaders, including his father, by arresting them at their homes in addition to arresting lawyers attending protests. Those arrested included a former president of the Pakistani Bar Association and two former presidents of the Supreme Court Bar Association.

The rally, which included about 600 attorneys, was co-sponsored by numerous bar groups in New York City and around the state. As I looked at the group on the steps of the New York County Supreme Court building and listened to my colleagues in the legal community, I could not have been prouder to be an attorney. In one hour, on a cloudy afternoon in November 2007, the legal profession demonstrated how it could come together almost immediately to show the world how attorneys can show their support for liberty and an independent legal system in another country thousands of miles away.