ISLAMABAD, Feb 15: The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a petition seeking review of the court’s detailed judgment giving reasons for validating Gen Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of the emergency on November 3, 2007, after government counsel questioned the real intention behind the petition.
President Musharraf’s counsel Sharifuddin Pirzada and Attorney General Malik Mohammad Qayyum insisted before a 13-member Supreme Court bench hearing the review petition of Tikka Iqbal Mohammad Khan that what the petitioner was seeking in the garb of the review was rehearing of the entire case without “showing errors floating evidently on the face of the detailed judgment”.
On Thursday, the apex court had announced a 110-page detailed judgment giving reasons for validating the declaration of emergency. But soon after the judgment, Tikka Mohammad Iqbal moved a review petition and the court constituted a 13-member larger bench to hear it.
When the case was taken up on Friday, Irfan Qadir, who had represented Tikka Iqbal Khan as legal counsel when a seven-member bench was hearing the challenge to the proclamation of emergency, was missing from the court.
In his place, Advocate-on-Record Arshad Chaudhry pleaded the case in a lacklustre manner and by reading the entire petition and then the review petition.
He did not give a categorical answer when asked by the media after the hearing about the whereabouts of Irfan Qadir who had to appear before the court to argue the review petition.
The dismissal of the review petition, in the opinion of some senior lawyers, hardly came as a surprise since the apex court had already validated on November 23, 2007, former army chief’s declaration of emergency through the Provisional Constitution Order.
Sharifuddin Pirzada contended that the review plea was totally misconceived because the petitioner was seeking rehearing of the entire case. Citing apex court’s judgment on the review petition of Wasim Sajjad against its validation of the October 12, 1999, military takeover, he recalled that the court had held that an already decided case could not be reheard.All points raised in the review petition had already been dealt with in details both in the short order as well as the detailed judgment in a most exhaustive manner, he argued.
Malik Qayyum said the judgment was being criticised without pointing out any error. “Nothing has been left in the judgment and it seems that the advocate-on-record had not gone through the judgment in detail,” the attorney general said.In its detailed judgment, he said, the apex court had reaffirmed the law which had been laid down by it in the Zafar Ali Shah case while validating the 1999 military coup.
He referred to the chapter on law and order in the judgment and said what he had been told by the Chinese government about recalling its nationals from Pakistan if attacks on them continued.
Defending the proclamation of emergency, he said a dying patient always underwent a surgical operation for removing his ailment.
