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LAHORE, Oct 3: The Lahore High Court office on Friday rejected on technical grounds PML-N president Shahbaz Sharif’s petition challenging the orders of an anti-terrorism court through which he had been declared a proclaimed offender in a criminal case.
Mr Sharif had requested the LHC to summon him from abroad to attend the proceedings of a criminal case and reverse the orders of the trial court. He had also prayed for restraining the federal government from thwarting his arrival to Pakistan for this purpose.
While refusing to mark the petition for regular hearing, the officer remarked that since the petitioner was an absconder, he did not have the locus standi to move the LHC and should first surrender himself before the trial court and then invoke the constitutional jurisdiction of the LHC. For these reasons, the petition was not maintainable and unfit for hearing, he said.
In response to this objection, petitioner’s counsel Manzoor Ahmad Malik filed the petition afresh on an argument that the office was not authorized to give such an observation because only the court could decide this point involving the exercise of judicial jurisdiction.
Now this petition is likely to be taken up as an objection case by the court assailing the LHC’s objection. The question as to whether the LHC was authorized to raise such an objection will be decided before the main petition.
Former DSP Omar Virk, SI Lala Roshan and three ASIs, Zulfiqar Ahmad, Muhammad Manzoor and Shamshad Ahmad, along with former SHO Babar Ashraf Ansari (who had been declared proclaimed offender), are among the six accused in this case. They had shot dead five youngsters — Salahuddin, Wasim, Haider, Rauf and Wakeel — in an alleged staged encounter at Sabzazar on April 27, 1998.
The FIR lodged on the orders of the Lahore High Court further stated that this encounter was staged on the orders of the then chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, who, according to complainant Saeed Salahuddin, resorted to extrajudicial killings to control crime.
DETAIL SOUGHT: The Lahore High Court on Friday sought details of complaints about rigging in the presidential referendum held on April 30, 2002, which the Election Commission of Pakistan was said to have received from all over the country.
A division bench, headed by Justice Tassadaq Hussain Jilani, hearing a petition against validity of the referendum, directed Deputy Attorney General Sher Zaman Khan to update the court in this regard by Oct 14. The court also inquired about the action taken by both the ECP and the federal government in response to these complaints.
Pakistan Lawyers Forum president A.K. Dogar had filed the petition requesting the court to declare the referendum void as it was massively rigged and used by Gen Pervez Musharraf as an extra-constitutional tool to stay in the office of the president.
The petitioner argued that his prime contention was that the court should consider the countrywide public protest against the alleged rigging in the referendum as a decisive factor in this petition.
“For simplicity of the matter, I am not asking the court to enter into a factual inquiry as to whether the election was rigged. All I demand is that the public sentiment and protest made at that time against the rigging exercise undertaken by the government to project highly favourable results should be used as criteria for deciding the petition,” he submitted, recalling that the Supreme Court had held in Nusrat Bhutto’s case that the court could take judicial notice of pubic protest concerning a constitutional matter.
He maintained that this observation of the SC was binding on the LHC and the current petition was quite identical to the Nusrat Bhutto case, as in both the cases allegations of massive rigging were raised. However, Justice Jilani observed that the political situation prevailing in 1977 could not be compared to the current scenario as in the former case the change had taken place through an extra-constitutional step. Besides, the SC had not annulled the 1977 elections despite severe allegations of rigging.
“This is not the first time that this court is seized of a petition raising rigging allegations. It happened in elections held in early 1950s, the presidential elections of 1964, those held in 1977 and the presidential referendum of Ziaul Haq,” the court remarked.
Mr Dogar argued that the current political situation was precarious as the opposition had threatened to launch a countrywide campaign against the Legal Framework Order, which was an outcome of the referendum while incidents of in-fighting during National Assembly sessions had become a routine matter.
Justice Jilani further inquired of the petitioner whether he could cite a single precedent in which a court had annulled the elections or a referendum within its constitutional jurisdiction on rigging charges.
Mr Dogar claimed that there had been the case of Jamal Shah, but the court refused to uphold this argument, saying that the case was not decided by the court within its constitutional jurisdiction. He submitted that he had a lot of documentary material in the form of press clippings with him to substantiate his claim of a strong public sentiment against the validity of referendum.
The petitioner submitted that the SC had held that newspaper clippings could be treated as admissible evidence, and he would rely solely on such clippings. He cited a news item pertaining to Pakistan Bar Council’s protest against the appointment of Justice Irshad Hassan Khan (retired) as the Chief Election Commissioner.
