ISLAMABAD – A four-member bench of the Supreme Court (SC) will on Monday hear a set of pleas against the rejection of a year’s extension in the service of four additional judges of the Lahore High Court (LHC) and two additional judges of the Sindh High Court (SHC) by the Parliamentary Committee (PC).
At the last hearing, the court had threatened ex-parte proceedings when no representative of the PC showed up to pursue the matter. The court had told Attorney General Anwarul Haq to represent the government in the next hearing and to also place on record the grounds on which the PC had rejected the extension.
Legal experts said the pleas would either be decided under the SC’s interim order on the 18th Amendment or under the provisions of the 19th Amendment. They said Article 175-A of the Constitution authorised the Judicial Commission to appoint judges of the superior courts. The LHC judges whose recommendations were rejected by the PC were Justice Muhammad Yawar Ali, Justice Syed Mazahir Ali Akbar Naqvi, Justice Mahmood Rashid Sheikh and Justice Muhammad Farrukh Irfan Khan.
The SHC judges were Justice Muhammad Tasneem Aslam and Justice Salman Hamid. The SC bench comprises Justice Mahmood Akhtar Shahid Siddiqui, Justice Jawwad S Khawaja, Justice Khilji Arif Hussain and Justice Tariq Parvez. The petitions were filed by lawyers Munir Hussain Bhatti and Kamran Murtaza as well as the Sindh High Court Bar Association.
