VCs’ Appointment: Intra court appeal’s outcome awaited

LAHORE: A division bench of the Lahore High Court (LHC) on Monday linked appointment of vice chancellors (VC) for six public universities in the Punjab with final outcome of the intra court appeal against a single bench order in petitions against the appointments.  The bench comprising Chief Justice Ijaz Ahmad Chaudhry and Justice Mazhar Iqbal Sidhu passed the order while admitting an intra court appeal against the June 24 decision of the single bench that had dismissed petitions challenging process of appointing VCs and the composition of the search committee. The court also issued notice to the Higher Education Commission and other respondents for first week of August.  The petition was filed by Dr Hassan Amir Shah, a professor at the Government College University Department of Physics through his counsel Senior Advocate Anwar Kamal. The counsel sought a stay order against the appointment process. Earlier, the court had observed that the process could not be stopped and linked the appointment to the final outcome of the appeal.  The appellant had objected to the selection criteria of the search committee. He has asked the court to set it aside.  The petitioner had also challenged the evaluation criteria by the members of the search committee and had questioned the eligibility of three of its private members for not having PhD degrees.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 5^th, 2011.