Hot potato: Several judges decline to hear Arbab Rahim’s petition against his unseating

His case has to wait till the chief justice returns to decide on a bench.

KARACHI: At least two benches of the Sindh High Court have refused to hear a petition filed by former chief minister and MPA Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim through his son Arbab Aurangzeb.

Rahim has challenged a resolution passed by the Sindh Assembly by a majority vote to unseat him for failing to attend sessions for at least 40 consecutive days. He was elected an MPA in the 2008 elections but has not come to the house since he was attacked there.

In the petition, he has argued that according to the rules of the house of elected representatives, a request to excuse him from attending was to be dealt with separately each day. But instead, the government kept the requests that piled up and then put them before the house all together on a single day. This is a violation of the rules, his lawyer Rasheed A Razvi has argued.

While explaining the reason behind removing him as MPA, Razvi argued that the government grew upset as Arbab Rahim did not support its candidates in the elections to the Senate or withdraw his party’s candidate. Besides this, the ruling party was irked that Arbab Rahim applied to become the leader of the opposition.

But the petition could not be heard on Monday because no judges agreed to hear it.

The petition was first placed before a bench comprising Justice Maqbool Baqar and Justice Shafi Siddiqui but they transferred it to another division bench of Justice Faisal Arab and Justice Nadeem Akhtar. Justice Nadeem Akhtar declined to hear the petition after which it was again placed before Justice Maqbool Baqar and Justice Shafi Siddiqui. This time Justice Maqbool Baqar declined to hear it and ordered that it be placed before the chief justice so he could form a new bench. He could also send it back.

While the file was doing the rounds, Arbab Rahim’s lawyer’s mother passed away after a protracted illness. Razvi left the SHC immediately and now the petition is awaiting the CJ’s orders. But he is unlikely to be available till April 5, the next working day, as he will be off to Islamabad as a member of the Memogate commission.

A few days ago, a bench of the SHC comprising Justice Maqbool Baqar and Justice Nadeem Akhtar dismissed a petition filed by Abdul Ghaffar Qureshi, a member of Arbab Rahim’s party, on the grounds that they were not the aggrieved party. It was recommended that they file a fresh petition after seeking power of attorney from Rahim.

An SHC circuit bench also declined to hear a petition filed by other leaders of the PML-Q on similar grounds.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 3^rd, 2012.