LAHORE, April 7: The petitioner in an intra-court appeal, challenging the Legal Frame Framework Order, on Monday pleaded in his additional written arguments submitted with the Lahore High Court that the court had ‘drastically cut short the proceedings’ on Friday last.

The division bench had reserved the judgment on the last hearing after it refused to accept the petitioner’s plea for granting him more than an hour to conclude his arguments in rebuttal of the Attorney General’s submissions. However, he had been allowed to submit his remaining arguments in writing in the court afterwards.

In his written arguments, the petitioner, Advocate A K Dogar, claimed that the bench members had changed their mind suddenly after the resumption of proceedings on Friday afternoon, and did not allow him further time to conclude the arguments. He added that the proceedings were scheduled to remain continued throughout Friday afternoon and even on Saturday, but were done away with suddenly by the court.

He quoted excerpts of the Supreme Court’s judgment in which it had questioned the professional conduct of LHC’s Justice Malik Muhammad Qayyum during the hearing of the SGS Cotecna reference against former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband Asif Zardari. “It can also be imagined when on the intervention of the court the proceedings were drastically cut short by the learned judges of the accountability bench, and the defence evidence was restricted to the recording of the statement of a single defence witness” he quoted an excerpt from page 598 of that SC’s judgment.

While touching the merits of the appeal, the petitioner submitted that ‘unbridled powers’ to amend the constitution during the three-year transitional period could not be given to the chief executive even on the touchstone of the state necessity. He quoted a reference from a SC’s judgment of 1955, emphasizing that matters related to the amendments to the constitution were not covered by the doctrine of necessity nor could the legislative powers be entrusted on anyone on the pretext of emergency.

He questioned the role of the National Security Council as proposed under the LFO on the grounds that the armed forces were an essential element of sovereignty of the state and were under the latter’s command. “Once the state loses that command it becomes ineffective, and must either change such law or abdicate,” he mentioned an excerpt of the SC’s judgment in the Asma Jillani case. He further quoted the SC as ruling that “a government elected by the constitution can only perform its functions and ensure observance of the provisions of the constitution by making the civil power superior to, and not subordinate to, the armed forces during peace as well as war.”

According to the petitioner, the constitutional amendments made by the chief executive could be resorted to, if the constitution failed to provide a solution to the attainment of declared objectives.

He stressed that the power of judicial review vested in the superior courts under the 1973 Constitution be taken away from them under any law, and these courts were fully authorized to review the LFO under the constitutional jurisdiction.