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Police officers walk past Pakistan’s Supreme Court building, in Islamabad, Pakistan, April 6, 2022. REUTERS
ISLAMABAD:
The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a request by PTI founder Imran Khan’s lawyer to arrange a meeting with his client during the proceedings in the Toshakhana case. The court also issued notice to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) in the case.
A three-member bench, headed by Justice Hashim Khan Kakar and comprising Justice Salahuddin Panhwar and Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim, heard multiple petitions related to Imran, including requests for cancellation of bail in the Cipher case, the Toshakhana case and the defamation case.
When Imran’s lawyer Latif Khosa asked the court to facilitate a meeting between him and Imran Khan, Justice Kakar firmly refused, stating that politicians had already taken away suo motu power from judges.
“How can we order a meeting in a criminal case? Political issues should be brought to parliament, not raised here in court,” he said. Justice Panhwar also asked how the court could issue orders on a case that had not even been decided before it.
The hearing saw an entertaining and somewhat unusual exchange when Khosa, while arguing that Imran’s three-year sentence in the Toshakhana-I case had been suspended but not the sentence itself, inadvertently cited a Supreme Court ruling that contradicted his own position.
Khosa argued that while the two-member bench of the Islamabad High Court (IHC) had suspended the sentence, the sentence itself had not been suspended, and this distinction prevented the PTI founder from contesting the elections despite the suspension.
Justice Kakar questioned this reasoning: “If a sentence is suspended on appeal, there should be no bar even from participating in elections. When a sentence is suspended, the person is free. Please read the relevant order of the high court.”
When Khosa read out the relevant paragraph of the IHC order, Justice Kakar noted that he had only requested a stay of the IHC sentence and that the court had granted exactly what he had asked for.
When Khosa cited a 2019 Supreme Court judgment in support of his argument, Justice Kakar asked him to read paragraph 13 of the same judgment. It then became clear that in that case, both the sentence and the trial had been suspended simultaneously, the opposite of what Khosa argued. The courtroom erupted in laughter.
