LHC to take up contempt plea against Zardari today

Petitioner to ask for show cause notice against president .

LAHORE:

A five-member bench of the Lahore High Court headed by Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial will start proceedings today (Wednesday) on a contempt petition against President Asif Ali Zardari, for allegedly violating court orders to give up political activities from the presidency or the office of PPP co-chairman.

Justices Nasir Saeed Sheikh, Sheikh Najamul Hasan, Ijazul Ahsan and Syed Mansoor Ali Shah will also be on the bench.

At the last hearing on June 27, a three-member bench had given Zardari until September 5 to disassociate the presidency from political activities. The petition was moved by Munir Ahmad through Advocate Muhammad Azhar Siddique and Advocate AK Dogar. The petitioner submitted that the use of the presidency for partisan political activities was illegal and amounted to showing contempt for the court orders of May 12, 2011.

President Zardari has not submitted a response to the contempt petition.

The petitioner’s counsel said that they would ask the court to issue a show-cause notice to the president for not responding to the plea.

On Tuesday, the petitioner also filed a civil miscellaneous application seeking permission to make some documents part of the judicial record for the contempt petition.

The application includes a reference to a case (PLD 1975 SC 383, Chaudhry Zahoor vs Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and others) in which claims to immunity for the president under Article 248 were disregarded, said the petitioners’ counsel.

They said that in its judgment the apex court headed by then chief justice Hamoodur Rehman held that contempt proceedings were sui-generis in nature and included elements of both civil and criminal proceedings.

The petitioner’s counsel said that the Contempt of Court Act of 2012 recently enacted by parliament had been rejected by the Supreme Court, so the act did not prevent contempt proceedings against the president.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 5^th, 2012.