October 22, 2006	Sunday	Ramazan 28, 1427

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window).

LAHORE, Oct 21: The Punjab government on Saturday moved the Lahore High Court in an intra-court appeal challenging a single bench’s Oct 18 judgment against the provincial government advisers and sought the decision, which it said was based upon mere conjectures and surmises, be set aside.

A division bench of the high court, yet to be constituted, will take up the ICA on Thursday, the first working day after Eidul Fitr holidays.

A deputy secretary from the provincial law department filed the ICA along with Advocate-General Mohammad Aftab Iqbal Chaudhry and it was marked to be fixed before a division bench.

As an interim relief, the ICA has sought the suspension of the operation of the decision given by Justice Mian Hamid Farooq with the objective that the 16 provincial government advisers stopped from working under the decision should resume their functions.

The appeal made the request for the suspension of the Oct 18 judgment on the ground that the advisers were not performing any public functions and the question of their appointment could not be raised through a writ petition under article 199 of the 1973 Constitution as the matter did not fall in the purview of this article of the basic law.

The ICA said the very fact that the petitioner had challenged the appointment of only Mian Mohammad Munir was ignored by the single bench which involved as respondents all the advisers to the government and the chief minister as well as special assistants whose names were not included in the writ petition. As such, the proceedings stepped beyond the parameters of the original prayer made in the petition. Such a judicial notice was unwarranted and uncalled for, according to the appeal.

The ICA also stated that the LHC’s single bench validated rule 6-A of the Punjab Rules of Business, 1974, stating in the decision that the appointment of special assistants and advisers to the chief minister was legitimate to the extent that five each of them could perform their functions. The advisers to the government were appointed under the same rule, and ruling all of them unlawful suffered from legal infirmity. It also stated that the petition had raised certain constitutional issues for whose interpretation the single bench should have called the attorney general, which it did not do.

The single bench, according to the ICA, also did not first establish the locus standi of the petitioner as such a notice was required to be taken. It stated that the court had to take a decision about the bona fide of Maulana Malik Shah Mohammad as the petitioner against Mian Munir, who, by no means, was an aggrieved party in his appointment. The ICA also stated the LHC decision had hit the prerogative and vested rights of the Punjab government.

The ICA stated that the single bench on July 20 restrained Hafiz Mohammad Iqbal Khan Khakwani from working as an adviser. The Punjab government filed an intra-court appeal against this decision. The ICA was yet pending when the verdict on the government advisers was announced. The court should have first decided the earlier ICA before proceeding further in the case, it contended.

The ICA has held the petitioner as a respondent besides all the 16 sacked advisers to the provincial government, six advisers to the chief minister and four special assistants who have been made pro forma respondents, against whom it has not sought any relief.