ISLAMABAD: Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) lawyer Faisal Siddiqi on Monday told the Supreme Court’s Cons­titutional Bench (CB) that his client intends to seek a review of May 22, 2025 order of rejecting an earlier challenge to the composition of the present 11-judge bench.

At the fag-end of Monday’s proceedings in the reserved seats case, the counsel apprised CB that he will move a review petition against the May 22 short order in which it dismissed a set of applications moved through senior counsel Hamid Khan and himself on behalf of SIC, challenging the composition of the 11-judge bench and requesting the inclusion of the judges who heard the reserved seats case during the first round of litigation.

One of the applications had asked CB to put off hearing in the review petitions until challenges to the 26th Amendment to the Constitution was decided first, since it was creating a lot of impediments.

At the time, the petitioners contended it would create a controversy, impeding the implementation of the judgement on the reserved seats if the two judges who dismis­sed the review petitions on the first day of hearing, nam­ely Justice Ayesha A. Malik and Justice Aqeel Ahmed Abbasi. may not sign the final order after the hearing.

Therefore, it was necessary that they either be included in the current bench, or the matter be referred back to the Judicial Commission of Pakistan (JCP) to nominate two other judges to enlarge the bench to 13 judges.

On Monday, CB also issued notices on an application by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to become a party in the present case. During the hearing, Faisal Siddiqi supported the July 12, 2024 judgment in which the Supreme Court had denied reserved seats to SIC — the petitioner party before the court — and allocated them to PTI. The counsel stated he was in agreement with the verdict that reserved seats in parliament cannot be left vacant.

When Justice Jamal Mandokhail wondered how the counsel could claim that both PTI and SIC were not separate parties, the counsel replied that the interests of both parties converged on the reserved seats case, as they were not in conflict over who gets the seats.

Published in Dawn, June 17th, 2025