Presidential reference: SC to resume hearing of ZAB case on Monday

Ten-member bench to also take up memo case.

ISLAMABAD:

After almost a year-long hiatus, the Supreme Court is set to resume the hearing of the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto reference case on Monday.

The case has been put on the roster of the apex court, following the court’s detailed judgment on the Asghar Khan petition issued on Thursday.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry had constituted a nine-member bench to resume the proceedings of the presidential reference after over 10 months.

In April 2011, President Asif Ali Zardari had appealed to the Supreme Court, through a presidential reference under Article 186 of the Constitution, seeking the court’s opinion on revisiting Bhutto’s murder trial, as well as seeking a revision of the death sentence awarded to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the former prime minister and Pakistan Peoples Party founder.

In January this year, the court stopped hearing the case after suspending the practicing licence of Senator Babar Awan, the government’s former counsel and a once vocal leader of the PPP. The move came after Awan criticised the court’s order in the memo case, allegedly in a contemptuous manner.

President Zardari has now appointed Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan as his new counsel in this case.

The court had also appointed 10 amicus curiae (Latin for ‘friend of the court’) on April 21. Some prominent lawyers, including SM Zafar and Aitzaz, were also among the 10 names, while some later disassociated themselves from the list.

Commenting on the reference case, Supreme Court Advocate Ahmed Raza Kasuri, who is a key party in the reference case as Bhutto was hanged on his FIR said the reference was regarding an old issue.

“As per law of the land, only a current issue can qualify for a reference. I think Zardari sahib has not prepared the reference as the president of Pakistan, rather as the son-in-law of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto which does not hold any valid ground,” he said.

“If such outdated judgments start reopening or getting reversed then there will be a flood of references,” Kasuri maintained, while questioning why there are two laws – one for Bhutto and the other for the general public.

SM Masood, another senior advocate of the Supreme Court and a former law minister, said that under clause 211 of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC), any person could be tried under the same article if he/she prepared false charges or provided false evidence to the court which caused harm to an innocent person.

Under this provision, he said, the decision of Bhutto’s conviction could be reversed and responsible elements, who prepared false charges, could be tried. The reference could also prove the former convicted prime minister as innocent in a bid to set the record correct, he maintained.

He added that some judges of the Bhutto case had later confessed that they were under immense pressure to give a decision against Bhutto. “If the judges themselves confessed of such a blunder, then why has a trial not been initiated against those judges and the victim proven innocent?” he added.

Memo case

The same bench will also resume hearing of the memo case on Monday. The bench will take up a report prepared by the Memo Commission, which was constituted by the chief justice.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 10^th, 2012.