An Irreplaceable Champion for Pakistan's Dispossessed Is Gone

I first met Asma Jahangir, the champion of human rights in Pakistan who died Sunday, at the Supreme Court in Islamabad. It was September 2007, and General Pervez Musharraf’s eight-year rule was tottering. For several months, a popular movement led by lawyers had harried him on the streets, and now, Musharraf feared, the judges were poised to disqualify him from office.

As a journalist, I was there to observe the hundreds of lawyers clamoring for Musharraf’s worst fears to be realized. Soon, they were outnumbered. The ranks of the baton-wielding police swelled as reinforcements arrived, including a contingent dressed in plain clothes with rocks in their pockets. The police began beating the lawyers on their heads, in some cases breaking the protesters’ spectacles, and causing blood to pour onto the black