LAHORE: The lawyer of teenage pace bowler Mohammad Amir insists he has faith in the ICC-appointed tribunal which will decide the fate of his client and two other players implicated in the spot-fixing scandal.
Amir, along with Mohammad Asif and Salman Butt, will face an ICC hearing in Doha starting on January 6. At present the trio has been barred from playing competitive cricket with the Pakistan Cricket Board suspending their central contracts.
The three cricketers face probable life bans from the sport if found guilty of the spot-fixing charges leveled against them.
Amir and Butt appealed against their suspensions at the end of October but saw their appeals rejected by Michael Beloff QC, who will also be chairing next month’s three-man tribunal to adjudicate the allegations.
With the ICC having selected the panel to preside the hearing, Amir’s lawyer Shahid Karim is confident of a fair outcome despite admitting that an independent tribunal would have been the preferred option.
“Looking at the case from a legalistic point of view, with the case being presented to an independent and unbiased tribunal, I think he would have had a fair chance of coming out clean,” PakPassion quoted Karim as saying. “However the situation is an odd one. Ideally we would have liked the tribunal to be completely independent of the ICC, but at this point in time I have to have full faith in the tribunal.”
Reflecting on Beloff’s appointment to the panel, Karim added: “We raised a slight objection to Michael Beloff QC chairing the hearing in Doha, as he had heard the case in the provisional hearing, but he chose not to remove himself. “However, as mentioned earlier, my training as a lawyer requires me to have full faith in the forthcoming tribunal and I should expect a fair hearing.
“Although the members of the three-man tribunal are already part of the anti-corruption commission which is a permanent body in the code of the ICC and is nominated by the ICC, I still think I have faith in their independence and impartiality.”
Karim added the 18-year-old Amir has been greatly affected by the scandal engulfing Pakistan cricket and is desperate to clear his name. He said: “Amir has been hit hard emotionally and financially.
“So early in his career, he’s been hit by this huge scandal. This is the type of scandal that is literally unprecedented in the cricketing world. Nothing of this proportion has ever happened before with so much hype surrounding it and with the kind of recordings that have been created against these players. “Emotionally he is drained, he’s been affected badly by it, but he’s coping as best he can and above all he is very confident he will come out of this clean. “There are certain mitigating circumstances and factors in Amir’s case that were spelt out in the initial hearing also. One of the mitigating factors is his age and the other mitigating factor is Amir’s previously unblemished record.”
