ISLAMABAD: Former attorney general Sardar Latif Khosa has requested Justice Khalilur Rehman Ramday of the Supreme Court not to sit on a bench which is due to take up on Friday corruption charges against him.

Mr Khosa submitted an application in this regard to the Supreme Court on Thursday.

A special bench comprising Justice Ramday, Justice Nasirul Mulk, Justice Raja Fayyaz Ahmed, Justice Jawwad S. Khawaja and Justice Ghulam Rabbani will commence proceedings on a complaint by Maghfoor Shah, former general manager of the National Highway Authority (NHA).

Mr Shah, who was convicted in a NAB case, has accused Mr Khosa of taking Rs3 million as bribe from him for getting a decision in his favour when Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar was heading the Supreme Court. He was sentenced to five-year imprisonment and fined over Rs3 million and $200,000.

The case was referred to the five-judge bench after Mr Khosa accused Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry of getting him removed from the post of attorney general.

Mr Khosa lost his post last month when the Supreme Court initiated a probe into the allegation.

In the application filed under Order 33, Rule 6, of the Supreme Court Rules 1980, Mr Khosa said false and slanderous allegations had been levelled against him.

‘In my over four decades of professional career, I have neither ever committed nor even can think of the alleged misconduct,’ he said, adding that the ‘maliciously motivated accusations for ulterior considerations’ had stigmatised him.
 
The application will be placed before the bench when the case is taken up. The applicant requested Justice Ramday to recuse himself from the bench on the touchstone of judicial precedents.

In his five-page application, he cited certain reported skirmishes and remarks and recalled that he was among the vanguards of the lawyers’ movement during which he almost lost his life when he was hit on the head during a ruthless baton-charge by police on a protest march on the Mall in Lahore on March 12, 2007.

He said his head still bore the scars of over a dozen stitches. He said he had accompanied the chief justice, who was deposed at the time, from Islamabad to Lahore and later to Multan and Sahiwal.

He said he had organised and addressed a huge gathering at the Marble Arch adjacent to the Hyde Park in London and read out a message of the chief justice and spoke to the Irish Bar at a special meeting.

Mr Khosa said he was with the slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto when she proclaimed on the Judges’ Lane in Islamabad that the flag of the chief justice would once again flutter on the house of Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.

When the Pakistan People’s Party came into power after the general elections of February 2008, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani had announced in his first statement in the National Assembly the removal of all barriers from around the house of the chief justice and other deposed judges.

Mr Khosa said that although his track record was one of complete subservience to the judiciary for being wedded to his profession through three generations, he had never felt comfortable with the judge and the cases of his clients hardly ever succeeded before him.

‘Needless to say that I kept bowing despite that. Maybe the cases lacked merit,’ the applicant said.