ISLAMABAD: A senior counsel for the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) plans to move a petition requesting the Supreme Court to review its order — passed on Thursday — of hearing the disqualification case against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, in Quetta from Monday.

Advocate Irfan Qadir, who represents PTI leader Ishaq Khakwani, had made his intentions known when he told a three-judge Supreme Court bench, headed by acting Chief Justice Jawwad S. Khawaja that he would not be attending the hearing in Quetta and that he would file a review petition challenging the Nov 6 order, which deferred hearing on case until Nov 10.

During a brief hearing on Thursday, the Supreme Court had ordered that the three identical petitions asking for the PM’s disqualification would be taken up on Nov 10 at the Supreme Court’s Quetta registry.

The petitions, filed by Gohar Nawaz Sindhu, PTI’s Ishaq Khakwani and PML-Q chief Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, all ask the court to unseat the prime minister for his alleged misstatement of facts on the floor of the National Assembly on Aug 29, when he said the government had not asked the armed forces to mediate or become a guarantor between the government and the protesting PTI and Pakistan Awami Tehreek.

“The review petition is ready and will be filed in a day or two,” Irfan Qadir told Dawn on Thursday.

Expressing his reservations, the counsel said that he represented one of the major political parties of the country, which had raised an important question through a petition and, therefore, should be heard.

On Thursday, the bench observed that it would hear the case in Quetta since no larger bench had been formed to hear pending matters related to the disqualification cases.

Attorney General Salman Aslam Butt had told the Supreme Court on Wednesday that cases regarding the disqualification of different members of the house, where the interpretation of Article 63(1f) of the Constitution was required, had been ordered clubbed by a different bench of the apex court. These cases were to be heard by a larger bench.

The court then suggested that it would first check the facts from the record and then decide whether to hear the disqualification case or not.

But Mr Qadir contended that he would not be attending the next hearing in Quetta and emphasised that his petition was different from Mr Sindhu’s appeal, which the court had also accepted by de-linking the case from the one he had filed.

It seems that justice was not being seen to be done, the counsel deplored. At this, the court assured him that he would be given a patient hearing in Quetta.

Mr Qadir also invited the attention of the court to his appeal against the rejection of his application, where he had requested that Justice Khawaja should not sit on the bench hearing the disqualification petition.

Talking to Dawn after court proceedings, Mr Qadir said it would be better that the bench should hear cases relating to local issues or petitions while in Quetta, rather than hearing the disqualification case, where no meaningful hearings had taken place since the petition was filed nearly 65 days ago.

Published in Dawn, November 7th, 2014