Islamabad  - Pakistan's ruling party on Saturday approved constitutional amendments to reduce the powers of embattled President Pervez Musharraf.

The approval came during a meeting of slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), which leads the new coalition government formed after the February 18 elections that saw Musharraf's political backers defeated.

Bhutto's widower Asif Ali Zardari, who now leads PPP, told reporters in Islamabad that the president would be stripped of his powers to dissolve the parliament and appoint the heads of the armed forces.

"We will ask the relics of the past (Musharraf) to give us full democracy," he said.

The other constitutional changes included limiting a presidential tenure to two terms, a clause aimed at limiting Musharraf's stay in power to the existing second term which will end by late 2012.

"We want to make the parliament supreme and we want the president's power returned to the prime minister," said the Law Minister Farooq Naik.

Under the proposal, judges who approve the suspension of the constitution by a military dictator would be viewed as committing high treason.

Zardari said his party would table the constitutional package only after consultations with the coalition partners and the lawyers' community, which is pressing for the reinstatement of 60 judges, including former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, sacked by Musharraf late last year.

The constitutional amendments, when passed would reduce Musharraf, a retired military chief who took over in a bloodless coup in 1999, to a mere ceremonial role, forcing him perhaps to quit.

"We intend him to walk away rather than impeach him away," said Zardari when asked whether his party was planning to oust Musharraf through impeachment.

However, in the same breath PPP chairman said he would engage the president in dialogue on the constitutional package, but said little about the restoration of judges, an issue over which the ruling alliance partners have parted, leaving the PPP-led government on shaky ground.

Nine ministers of the second largest Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif resigned from the cabinet on May 13 in protest at a failure to reinstate the judges which has triggered sharp public criticism.

The judges are esteemed as champions of democracy for defying a former military dictator and renewed a campaign by influential lawyers to reinstate them.

More than 2,000 members of the legal fraternity and political workers on Saturday chanted slogans of "Go Musharraf, go" and "Restore our chief Justice" as Chaudhry left his residence in a convoy of more than 300 vehicles for industrial city of Faisalabad.

Thousands of people were expected to turn out to attend the lawyers' convention in Faisalabad, some 290 kilometres south-west of Islamabad, in support of the suspended justices.

"We are not in conflict with the coalition government. Instead we want to become its strength in getting the judges reinstated," said a senior lawyer Ali Ahmad Kurd. (dpa)