LAHORE, Jan 20: The Pakistan Lawyers Forum has challenged in the Supreme Court the 17th Amendment to the constitution on the ground that it has altered the federal parliamentary system and eroded the ideological basis of the country , the two basic features of the constitution, which even an elected parliament is not empowered to enact.

The PLF moved the constitutional petition to the Supreme Court on Tuesday through its president advocate Mr AK Dogar who submitted that by grafting the Legal Framework Order (LFO) into the body of the constitution in the form of the 17th Amendment, the fundamentals of the basic law stood sufficiently eroded.

The petitioner-advocate also contended that Gen Pervez Musharraf had, through the amendment, got himself elected as the president. By doing so, the president had subverted the constitution and acted in direct contravention of the constitutional principles as enunciated by the apex court that no authority, even the elected parliament, was empowered to change the federal system and the state's ideological basis.

The petitioner prayed to the Supreme Court that the 17th Amendment be declared unconstitutional and illegal. The petition, which has made president Gen Pervez Musharraf, Prime Minister Mir Zafarulla Khan Jamali, Jamaat-i-Islamiamir Qazi Husain Ahmad and PML president Chaudhry Shujaat Husain as respondents, has cited the Wukala Mahaz case (PLD 1998 SC 1263), the Benazir Bhutto case (PLD 1988 SC 416) and the judgment in Syed Zafar Ali Shah's case (PLD 2000 SC 869 at 1219-1223) as major argument in support of the plea.