ZA Bhutto’s sentence: Lawyers differ on maintainability of review petition

Qazi Anwar says it’s time SC admits its mistake; Ahmad Raza Kasuri says he will contest the reference.

ISLAMABAD:

Former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association and constitutional expert Qazi Muhammad Anwar has said that it was high time for the apex court to admit that the death sentence awarded to the former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was unfair and unjust.

Qazi Anwar, who was among prominent lawyers who led the campaign for the restoration of the independent judiciary, told The Express Tribune that although he was not willing to appear before the Supreme Court on behalf of President Asif Ali Zardari during the hearing of a reference to be filed by the president, he would appreciate if the court admitted its faults.

“The Supreme Court had admitted on many occasions that it had made mistakes in the past, upholding the imposition of martial laws being one of them,” he said, adding: “The Supreme Court should also admit that the death sentence to Bhutto was partly the judiciary’s fault.”

“It was (an) ethnically loaded judgment by the then Supreme Court as four judges who rejected the appeal of Bhutto belonged to Punjab, while judges who declared him innocent were from smaller provinces,” he said.

“The apex court should keep this aspect in mind while handling the reference,” he added

Qazi did not agree with lawyers who say that Bhutto had already exercised the right to review by the Supreme Court, therefore, another review was not maintainable.

“There are precedents that the Supreme Court had allowed the right to appeal to (certain) people twice,” he said and cited the Naimatullah and Aminullah versus Government of Pakistan case as a precedent.

Ahmed Raza Kasuri, the lawyer on whose complaint Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was tried and sentenced to death, has said that the sentence will remain controversial even if the Supreme Court declared it to be against justice.

Kasuri told The Express Tribune that he would contest the reference.

“I am a party in the original case,” he said adding: “Therefore, I will appear in the Supreme Court to defend the judgment.”

He said that the reference would not be maintainable because the review petition filed by Bhutto himself had already been rejected by the then Supreme Court.

He said that the three judges who declared Bhutto to be innocent had also rejected the review.

Barrister Baacha said that the review petition was maintainable.

However, another former judge of the Supreme Court Wajihuddin, former judge of the Balochistan High Court Tariq Mehmood and MAK Dogar, are of the view that the reference was not maintainable.



Published in The Express Tribune, April 03^rd, 2011.