ISLAMABAD: Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday urged the Supreme Court to constitute a bench to reconsider the chief justice’s Nov 16 order of rejecting his plea to declare the National Accountability Bureau’s (NAB) multiple corruption references against him as illegal.

Moved under Order V, Rules 2(5) of the Supreme Court Rules, 1980, the fresh application stated that the bench so constituted should also order the court office to assign a proper registration number to Mr Sharif’s main petition and then fix it before a bench of the court to commence hearing of the same.

On Nov 16, Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar had upheld the decision of the SC registrar’s office of returning Mr Sharif’s appeal moved to seek a declaration that NAB’s multiple corruption references against him was illegal.

The appeal was taken up by the chief justice in his chambers in which senior counsel Khawaja Haris Ahmed represented the former prime minister. In his appeal, Mr Sharif had requested the Supreme Court to set aside the Oct 20 order of the assistant registrar of returning his main plea and direct the office to assign a number to the petition and fix it for hearing before a bench of the court.

A five-judge Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Asif Saeed Khosa, while deciding the Panama Papers case on July 28, had ordered NAB to furnish references against Mr Sharif and his family members on the basis of the material collected by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT).

Mr Sharif and his family members are facing three corruption references before the Accountability Court No 1, Islamabad, which has already indicted the former premier in these references.

In the fresh application, Mr Sharif’s counsel Khawaja Haris pleaded before the court that he was filing the new application as a matter of abundant caution, adding that the Nov 16 order had not taken into account that it had been held by this court in earlier judgements that the mere fact that a party had misplaced and misdirected itself in presenting its case would not be considered to be an impediment in correcting a judgement passed by the Supreme Court.

In fact, he said, it had been categorically held by the apex court in earlier judgements that dismissal of the review petition did not limit the inherent powers of the apex court under Article 184(3) (enforcement of fundamental rights) and Article 187 of the Constitution (issue and execution of process of the Supreme Court) to set the law right where the judgement is per incuriam (without jurisdiction) and no amount of technicalities could stand in the way of this court in achieving this goal.

Earlier on Dec 2, the ousted prime minister had also filed a similar application pleading that it was the constitutional duty and obligation of the court to hear a matter on merits when a judgement passed by it was challenged on the grounds of it being per incuriam. Therefore, such a petition could not be disposed of by a judge in chambers, he said, adding that the Nov 16 order had forced the petitioner (Nawaz Sharif) to face the rigours of multiple prosecutions for a single offence, which was tantamount to violation of his fundamental rights under Article 10-A of the constitution.

In the main petition, Mr Sharif had pleaded before the apex court to declare that its July 28 judgement, to the extent that it directed filing of three references against the petitioner, was per incuriam, being repugnant to the provisions of Articles 4, 9, 10A, 13 and 25 of the constitution.

Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2017