SHC seeks reports about missing original copy of Constitution

The federal government has failed to respond to the court's repeated queries since 2013.

KARACHI: The Sindh High Court (SHC) has given an additional-month's time to file reports about the theft of the original draft of the Constitution of 1973, as the federal government failed to answer the court's repeated queries.

A division bench of the court, headed by SHC Chief Justice Faisal Arab, sought the reports within a month.

The controversy arose in September 2013 when a non-governmental trust approached the high court with a plea to order the federal authorities to register a case for the alleged theft of the Constitution's original manuscript.

Agha Attaullah Shah, the chairperson of the Raah-e-Rast Trust, had taken the interior ministry and the Islamabad IG to court. In his petition, Shah claimed that reports published by various news websites were true and the original manuscript, which bore the signatures of the then president and constituent assembly members, was indeed missing. He cited parliamentary sources indicating that the document, which he termed "the most important and authentic document," had been missing from the Parliament's archives for a long time.

The petitioner also pointed out that before the approval of the 18th Amendment, then National Assembly speaker Fehmida Mirza had requested to see the original document of the Constitution but was informed that the document was missing from the assembly's records.

Since September 2013, the high court has issued repeated directives to the federal government's law officers to submit reports from the relevant authorities, accepting or denying the theft of the document. However, the law officers merely responded with periodic requests for more time to file the reports.

During a hearing on Thursday, the deputy attorney-general sought a month's time to obtain the reports from the relevant authorities and submit them in court. Adjourning the hearing, the SHC bench granted the time as requested by the law officer to file comments.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 2^nd, 2015.