ISLAMABAD: Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday
urged the Supreme Court to constitute a bench to reconsider the chief
justice’s Nov 16 order of rejecting his plea to declare the National
Accountability Bureau’s (NAB) multiple corruption references against him
as illegal.
Moved under Order V, Rules 2(5) of the
Supreme Court Rules, 1980, the fresh application stated that the bench
so constituted should also order the court office to assign a proper
registration number to Mr Sharif’s main petition and then fix it before a
bench of the court to commence hearing of the same.
On
Nov 16, Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar had upheld the decision of the SC
registrar’s office of returning Mr Sharif’s appeal moved to seek a
declaration that NAB’s multiple corruption references against him was
illegal.
The appeal was taken up by the chief justice in
his chambers in which senior counsel Khawaja Haris Ahmed represented
the former prime minister. In his appeal, Mr Sharif had requested the
Supreme Court to set aside the Oct 20 order of the assistant registrar
of returning his main plea and direct the office to assign a number to
the petition and fix it for hearing before a bench of the court.
A
five-judge Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Asif Saeed Khosa,
while deciding the Panama Papers case on July 28, had ordered NAB to
furnish references against Mr Sharif and his family members on the basis
of the material collected by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT).
Mr
Sharif and his family members are facing three corruption references
before the Accountability Court No 1, Islamabad, which has already
indicted the former premier in these references.
In the
fresh application, Mr Sharif’s counsel Khawaja Haris pleaded before the
court that he was filing the new application as a matter of abundant
caution, adding that the Nov 16 order had not taken into account that it
had been held by this court in earlier judgements that the mere fact
that a party had misplaced and misdirected itself in presenting its case
would not be considered to be an impediment in correcting a judgement
passed by the Supreme Court.
In fact, he said, it had
been categorically held by the apex court in earlier judgements that
dismissal of the review petition did not limit the inherent powers of
the apex court under Article 184(3) (enforcement of fundamental rights)
and Article 187 of the Constitution (issue and execution of process of
the Supreme Court) to set the law right where the judgement is per
incuriam (without jurisdiction) and no amount of technicalities could
stand in the way of this court in achieving this goal.
Earlier
on Dec 2, the ousted prime minister had also filed a similar
application pleading that it was the constitutional duty and obligation
of the court to hear a matter on merits when a judgement passed by it
was challenged on the grounds of it being per incuriam. Therefore, such a
petition could not be disposed of by a judge in chambers, he said,
adding that the Nov 16 order had forced the petitioner (Nawaz Sharif) to
face the rigours of multiple prosecutions for a single offence, which
was tantamount to violation of his fundamental rights under Article 10-A
of the constitution.
In the main petition, Mr Sharif
had pleaded before the apex court to declare that its July 28 judgement,
to the extent that it directed filing of three references against the
petitioner, was per incuriam, being repugnant to the provisions of
Articles 4, 9, 10A, 13 and 25 of the constitution.
