Malik Muhammad Qayyum was born in Lahore on 18th December 1944. His father, Malik Muhammad Akram, was also a celebrated lawyer and later a Judge of the Lahore High Court. Justice Akram was also a member of the five-member Lahore High Court bench which had handed down capital punishment to former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in a unanimous decision.
He got his Bachelor’s degree (BA) from FC College, Lahore in 1961. Later he passed his Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from the Punjab University Law College, Lahore in 1963.
Malik Mohammad Qayyum
Born on 18 Jan 1944
Died on 17 Feb 2023
He started his career as a legal practitioner in 1964. He soon had earned respect both in the courtrooms and the bar. He was elected as the Lahore Bar Association Secretary in 1970 and as its President in 1980. He was elected member of the Punjab Bar Council for the period 1984-88 and in February 1984 he was appointed Deputy Attorney-General, the office he held till his elevation as judge of the Lahore High Court on Oct 26, 1988. In addition to his responsibilities as the high court judge, he was also nominated as a Punjab Local Election Commission member. He also remained chairman of the High Court Rules & Orders Committee and Library Committee as well as administration judge of the Computer Cell when it was set up in 1991.
He got to fame after conducting an investigation into match-fixing claims against the nation’s top cricketers in the late 1990s and slapping Test cricketers Saleem Malik and Ata-ur Rehman with lifelong bans. He was widely recognized by the cricketing community for leading a highly comprehensive investigation into match-fixing, and for writing the Qayyum Report. The report was published in May 2000 and resulted in lifetime bans for Malik and Rehman. Wasim Akram, Mushtaq Ahmed, Waqar Younis, Inzamam-ul Haq, Akram Raza and Saeed Anwar were also fined and received warnings. This report was widely recognized as the first thorough investigation into instances of corruption in cricket. The investigation lasted a year, from September 1998 to September 1999, and took place in a courtroom at the Lahore High Court, where he presided over 40 hearings and heard testimonies and received evidence from nearly 70 players, former Players, Cricket Administrators and former Administrators. At the same time, he was also hearing the case against former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and former President Asif Zardari, who had been charged with political corruption.
He had to tender his resignation as Judge of the Lahore High Court when he, along with Justice Rashid Aziz, was declared as “biased” by the Supreme Court in 2001 in the hearing of a corruption case against former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Later he started practice in the Supreme Court. He was elected President of the Supreme Court Bar Association in the year 2005. He was also counsel of former Punjab Chief Minister Mian Shahbaz Sharif in a case filed in the apex court for the return of the latter to Pakistan from exile. In 2007, he also served as Attorney General of Pakistan. He had previously defended Musharraf in most of the cases since the outbreak of the judicial crisis following the imposition of emergency in November 2007.
He was the eldest brother of Muhammad Pervez Malik, former Minister of Commerce, who contested 2002 polls and became MNA from the platform of the PML-N and Dr Mian Javed Akram, a Senior Physician of PIMS, while his brother-in-law Mian Misbah-ur-Rehman is a district level leader of the PPP and his son Barrister Ahmad Qayyum is a former secretary of the Lahore High Court Bar Association and a member of the Punjab Bar Council.
He passed away on 17th February, 2023 in Lahore, at the age of 79. Later he was buried in the Miani Sahib Graveyard in Lahore.
