Licences of two lawyers suspended

IHC initiates contempt proceedings against one lawyer

ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad High Court on Monday suspended the licences of two lawyers as it initiated contempt of court proceedings against them.

The court initially ordered to arrest one of the lawyers, but later released him after he submitted an unconditional apology and the bar association intervened.

While issuing directions against lawyers Sohail Ahmed and Mushtaq Gulbaz, Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui of the Islamabad High Court (IHC) ordered them to submit their licence so that they could be verified as well.

The order came as the court heard a case wherein Justice Siddiqui had ordered to immediately hand over possession of a plot located in Sector E-7 to the petitioner. The petitioner has been struggling to retrieve possession of the plot for the past 35 years.

The plot, which saw a house built on it in the early 1980s, has shuttled between different occupants and is currently occupied by one of the lawyers. All the while, petitioner Faiza and her husband Khawaja Abdul Sami have been forced to stand by as spectators despite obtaining favourable judgments from various courts in the capital.

“Doesn’t any law apply to lawyers,” Justice Siddiqui remarked during Monday’s as he observed that an order he had passed on November 14 had been violated.

“This is a Jagga [tyrant] court,” shot back Ahmed, adding that if Justice Siddiqui was interested in the said property, he could hand over the keys to him.

This infuriated the court and it issued an order for his arrest for contempt.

However, the lawyer later submitted an unconditional apology and sought the bar association’s help to avoid going to jail.

Justice Siddiqui accepted his apology but did not stop contempt proceedings against him, setting December 20 as the date for the hearing.

Around 40 years ago, the Capital Development Authority (CDA) had launched Sector E-7 in the capital where Sami and his wife were among the lucky ones to be drawn in the plot’s balloting process. The couple, however, could not take possession of their two-Kanal plot with the forcibly occupied.

When Sami approached the CDA, he discovered that the plot had been sold by his wife through an attorney whom neither he nor his wife knew.

The couple has been embroiled in litigation ever since with rulings of the IHC and the Supreme Court in their favour.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 19^th, 2017.