ISLAMABAD, Oct 26: The Supreme Court on Friday maintained its earlier ruling that employees of government-owned corporations, companies and organisations whose terms and condition of service were not regulated by statutory rules could not be categorised as civil servants.

Authored by Justice Syed Jamshed Ali, the judgment settled a total of 2,162 petitions moved to seek review of its 2006 judgment in the Mubeen-us-Salam case in which the apex court, while interpreting section 2-A of the Federal Service Tribunals Act, 1973, had held that such employees could not avail themselves of remedy from the Federal Services Tribunal (FST) for redressal of their grievances.

The government had on June 10, 1997, inserted section 2-A by amending the Federal Service Tribunals Act, 1973, to make employees of the government-owned corporations, companies and organisations civil servants.

The vires of the amendment came under consideration of the Supreme Court through a large number of petitions in 2006. During the hearing, the court noted that under section 2-A of the STA, the legislature had not declared the service of a person in a government-controlled organisation to be in the “service in connection with the affairs of the federation”.

On Sept 12 and 13, 2007, a nine-member bench comprising Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, Justice Javed Iqbal, Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar, Justice Faqir Mohammad Khokhar, Justice Mian Shakirullah Jan, Justice M. Javed Buttar, Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani, Justice Syed Jamshed Ali and Justice Hamid Ali Mirza had heard the 2,162 review petitions against its earlier decision.

Deciding the cases, the judgment held that out of the 2,162 review petitions, 1,827 stood abated as a result of which proceedings and judgments in the cases rendered by the Federal Service Tribunal also stood nullified.

Therefore, the affected/aggrieved parties have three months to find recourse to available remedies.

Similarly, judgments of the FST, rendered on the basis of section 2-A of the Service Tribunals Act, 1973, but were never challenged before the Supreme Court, have attained finality.

Therefore, decisions on these cases will be implemented by the organisations concerned without dragging the employees into further litigation. Likewise, the cases in which services of the employees are governed by statutory rules are not hit by Mubeen-us-Salam case.

The court accepted 335 of 2,162 cases for hearing.

Justice Jamshed Ali said: “We will like to observe that concept of abatement is not capable of exact definition and the basis of our conclusion flows from the determination of this court that in case services of an employee are not governed by statutory rules, he cannot invoke Section 2-A and in such cases the Service Tribunal has no jurisdiction.”

After such a finding, it could not possibly be said that only matters pending before this court would abate, leaving the judgments of the Service Tribunal intact, he said.