The new governing coalition pledged on March 9 to reinstate the former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, within 30 days of taking office. The move would also include 13 other Supreme Court judges and 48 High Court judges who were dismissed by Musharraf in the fall.

Chaudhry, the symbol of Pakistan’s vibrant lawyers movement and one of the catalysts for the strong anti-Musharraf sentiment across the country, has been under house arrest in the capital since November 3 with his wife and three children. He has been allowed no visitors, and he has managed only intermittent telephone contact with the outside world.

Once Gillani and a yet to be announced cabinet are sworn in, probably by the end of the week, the barricades around Chaudhry’s house in Islamabad will almost certainly be removed, lawyers said. Plans to encourage Chaudhry to walk from his house to the gates of the Supreme Court in celebration and confrontation when the police cordon at his home is removed have been dropped, said Athar Minallah, a leader of the lawyers’ movement.

Zardari has been using the weeks since his party swept into power in the recent parliamentary elections to secure his own authority. On Wednesday, the new coalition elected a parliamentary speaker, Fahmida Mirza, by the two-thirds majority needed for an impeachment vote. Mirza, the wife of Zulfikar Mirza, one of Zardari’s close confidants, is the first woman to be elected speaker in Pakistan.

After his wife’s death in December, Zardari returned to Pakistan from his home in Manhattan to take control of the Pakistani Peoples Party, leading it to victory in the elections last month. But he did not run for a parliamentary seat himself because he missed the deadline. He also lacks a bachelor’s degree, a requirement introduced by the Musharraf government for parliamentary candidates.