ISLAMABAD, Feb 7: The Supreme Court on Wednesday admitted for regular hearing an appeal of former chairman Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC) Lt Gen (retired) Jamshaid Gulzar Kiani and four other members against their removal from service by curtailing their service tenure.

A two-member bench, comprising Justice Faqir Muhammad Khokhar and Justice Ghulam Rabbani, took up their joint appeal against the March 8, 2006 order of the Rawalpindi Bench of the Lahore High Court that endorsed their removal from service.

In their petition, Jamshaid Gulzar and four members namely Gul Hanif, Justice (retired) Abdur Rehman Khan, Javed Akram and Tariq Saeed Haroon have urged the court to declare as illegal and unconstitutional the Federal Public Service Commission (Second Amendment) Ordinance, 2005 (Ordinance XXV of 2005) under which their service tenure was curtailed from five years to three years.

On Wednesday, Akram Sheikh Advocate, the counsel for the appellants, submitted before the bench that the vested rights of the petitioners could not be abridged or taken away by President Pervez Musharraf by simply promulgating the ordinance in 2005.

He contended that the petitioners were appointed as chairman or members of the commission for five years under the relevant law hence their appointments should be considered as past and closed transactions, as these could not be affected by the ordinance.

He argued that Article 89 of the Constitution clearly provided that if an ordinance was not approved, it would lapse after four months. The underlying object is to guard the legislative power of the National Assembly which could not be allowed to be usurped by any head of the state in the presence of parliament, he contended. If parliament does not stand dissolved, the president cannot usurp its legislative powers by repeating the same ordinance, he emphasized.

The said ordinance was placed before parliament as a bill which did not become an act, as the federal government could not sail it through the two houses of parliament, Akram Sheikh recalled.