ISLAMABAD: A contempt petition has been filed in the Supreme Court against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif for delivering his speech at the 70th United Nations General Assembly session in English.

Mian Zahid Ghani, the petitioner, contends that the prime minister had flouted the Sept 8 Supreme Court verdict which directed the federal and provincial governments to use, without any delay, Urdu for official and other purposes.

He said the heads of other states, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj, Cuban President Raul Castro, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had addressed the same UN meeting in their national languages.

Take a look: Ways to switch over to Urdu

Prime Minister Sharif, the petition said, had committed an offence and, therefore, should be prosecuted under Article 204 of the Constitution read with Contempt of Court Ordinance 2003.

This is the second such petition. Earlier, a habitual petitioner, Mahmood Akhtar Naqvi, had moved a similar petition requesting the Supreme Court to hold the prime minister in contempt for flouting, with impunity, its Sept 8 judgment.

Contempt petitions against sitting prime ministers are nothing new in Pakistan. On April 26, 2012, the Supreme Court had handed down a symbolic punishment lasting less than a minute to then prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani for committing contempt, though he was later disqualified as member of parliament by another bench headed by then chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry on June 19, 2012, on the same charges.

In its petition, Zahid Ghani argued that since Prime Minister Sharif knew about the Sept 8 judgment, the apex court should order his disqualification as member of the National Assembly under Articles 62 and 63 (1 g) of the Constitution.

The petitioner also annexed with his petition the Sept 8 judgment in which former chief justice Jawwad S. Khawaja acknowledged the contentions raised before the court that the governments were deliberately not implementing Article 251 of the Constitution which asked for making arrangements to implement Urdu for official and other purposes within 15 years of commencement of the constitution.

The verdict also asked the governments to consider and implement the three-month timeline, given by the government itself in a July 6, 2015, letter to all government departments, and directed the federal and the provincial governments to coordinate with each other for uniformity in the ‘rasmulkhat’, or font style of the national language.

In addition, federal and provincial laws will also be translated into the national language within three months, as suggested by the government in the July 6 letter; whereas statutory, regulatory and oversight bodies will take steps to implement Article 251 without delay and ensure compliance.

The verdict also asked the governments to introduce the language in competitive examinations at the federal level. Judgments in cases relating to public interest litigation or those judgments enunciating a principle of law in terms of Article 189 must also be translated into Urdu and published in line with Article 251 of the Constitution.

Published in Dawn, October 24th, 2015

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