Musharraf moves LHC against treason verdict

Former military dictator Pervez Musharraf moves LHC against verdict sentencing him to death

LAHORE: Former military ruler Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf has moved the Lahore High Court against his conviction by a special court for high treason, requesting the LHC to set aside the judgment, which he claims, is “a mix of anomalies and contradictory statements”.

Musharraf filed the 89-page petition on Friday through his counsel Azhar Siddique, 10 days after the three-judge special court – headed by Justice Waqar Ahmad Seth – awarded him the death penalty for abrogating the Constitution and imposing emergency rule in the country on Nov 3, 2007.

The septuagenarian former president – who has been out of the country since 2016 – had earlier petitioned the LHC to stay the special court proceedings which was referred by an LHC bench to the high court chief justice for formation of a full bench on the same day the special court issued its short order.

The LHC full bench – headed by Justice Mazahir Ali Akbar Naqvi – will take up that petition on Jan 9.

In the latest petition, Musharraf claims that the treason case verdict is “a mix of anomalies and contradictory statements” and that the special court – which was formed in Nov 2013 – “rapidly and hurriedly wrapped up the trial which was far from conclusion”.

“The special court […] announced an award of capital punishment to the applicant without examining the accused under Section 342 of the Criminal Procedure Code (power to examine the accused).

“The importance of examining the accused in a criminal trial is enormous and any lapse, failure or omission to fulfill this requirement adversely affects the prosecution case,” says the petition.

It further claims that the special court has not taken into account the fact that the petitioner [Musharraf] did not take any action detrimental to national interest and that the offence of high treason could not be established from the evidence presented against him.

It has particularly challenged paragraph 66 of the detailed judgment authored by the presiding judge of the special court, which was described as “unprecedented and despicable” by Federal Law Minister Barrister Farogh Naseem.

Para 66, which came to be known as “grisly three-day hanging rider” to Musharraf’s sentence, says the court directs “the law enforcement agencies to strive their level best to apprehend the fugitive/convict and to ensure that the punishment is inflicted as per law and if found dead, his corpse be dragged to the D-Chowk, Islamabad, Pakistan, and be hanged for three days”.

The petitioner says that the presiding judge has crossed all limits while writing the rider as our religion, law and the Constitution do not allow humiliation of a dead body. “The honourable respective president of the special court has crossed all religious moral, civil and constitutional limits, while ruthlessly, irreligiously, unlawfully, unrealistically awarding a debilitating, humiliating, unprecedented and against the dignity of a person sentence".

“Transparent trial is a right of every citizen as per the Constitution. I was kept deprived of transparent trial by the special court,” says the petitioner.

Musharraf, 76, is the first former army chief to be charged with treason in Pakistan. The military has strongly reacted to the special court verdict, saying it has caused “pain and anguish” in the rank and file of the armed forces. It also said that “the due legal process seems to have been ignored” in the proceedings.