Pakistani government moves SC for constitution of full court

Islamabad, May 3 (UNI) The Pakistan government has requested the Supreme Court to expand the five-member bench hearing identical petitions, including that of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, into a full court.

The request was made on behalf of Sharifuddin Pirzada, representing President Gen Pervez Musharraf late yesterday.

Pirzada said in the application to the Supreme Court that the five-member bench was open to question on various grounds because it comprised four junior judges and one ad hoc whose appointment had been challenged in the apex court, the Dawn newspaper reported .

The government had opposed the idea of a full court when on April 27 the chief justice had requested formation of a full court comprising all Supreme Court judges.

The government had then argued that fixing of a matter for a particular date and constitution of a bench to hear a particular case was the prerogative of the chief justice and no party to the case had any right to ask for the same.

The five-member bench had been formed by Acting Chief Justice Rana Bhagwandas last Saturday to take up a number of petitions from May 7, including one by Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry against the formation of the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) and challenging the president's move to file a reference against him.

The government pleaded that Justice M Javed Buttar, who is to head the larger bench is junior to five judges, adding that the exclusion of five senior judges - Khalilur Rehman Ramday, Mohammad Nawaz Abbasi, Faqir Mohammad Khokhar, Falak Sher and Mian Shakirullah Jan - from the bench was inexplicable.

It said the referring authority or the President in the chief justice's petition had a legitimate expectation that the acting chief justice would fix the matter for hearing before a full court following the precedent in the 1998 Asad Ali case.

According to the application, the government would not have filed the application if the acting chief justice had constituted a bench comprising the most senior judges to hear the matter.

President Musharraf had sacked Justice Chaudhry on March 9 and sent a reference against him to the SJC for misuse of powers.

Chaudhry, who denies the charges, took his case to the Supreme Court, which he once headed.

UNI