Islamabad: President Asif Ali Zardari will sign a landmark constitutional reforms bill on Monday, making it part of the Pakistan's constitution, his spokesman has said.
Chief of the main opposition Pakistan Muslim League-N party Nawaz Sharif has accepted the president's invitation to attend the signing ceremony to be held at the presidency.
The president extended the invitation to Sharif in a telephone conversation on Sunday with the former prime minister.
The 18th Constitutional Amend Bill was formulated by an all-parties parliamentary committee headed by ruling Pakistan People's senior leader Senator Raza Rabbani after nine months of intensive deliberations. It was adopted this month with more than two-thirds majority by both houses of the parliament, the 342-member National Assembly (lower house) and the 100-member Senate.
In celebration of the passage, Zardari had granted remission in terms to prisoners in jails throughout the country.
The bill, which makes over 100 constitutional amendments, is designed to restore a genuine parliamentary system of government by removing self-serving provisions inserted into in the constitution by military rulers Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf.
Under it key powers including the authority to appoint chiefs of army, navy and abir force would stand transferred to the prime minister from the president, who until now has had a central role overshadowing the former.
The bill scraps a discretionary presidential authority used in the past by heads of state to dissolve elected governments and also lays down a mechanism for appointment of judges of superior courts through a judicial commission under parliamentary oversight.
Ahead of the signing of the bill into force, a lawyer has moved a petition in the Supreme Court here, challenging the mechanism for appointment of judges, which the petitioner contends would hurt the independence of the judiciary.
