Govt won’t ask Swiss authorities to reopen Zardari cases

In complete defiance of Supreme Court orders in the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) case, the government has decided not to write a letter to the Swiss authorities to reopen the cases against President Asif Ali Zardari, clearly suggesting that it is going to confront the superior judiciary. A source told Pakistan Today on Sunday that the federal government had taken a principled decision not to write the letter and would implement a three-pronged strategy to deal with the situation instead. “The party has decided to launch a media campaign to portray the judiciary as biased and selective, take the party workers into confidence and rally them against the biased attitude of the judiciary, while in the meantime the PPP leadership would gear up a mass contact drive to take the people on the streets into confidence over the conspiracy against the government,” said the source.
When contacted to ask whether the government would write a letter to the Swiss authorities or not, Law Minister Maula Bux Chandio told Pakistan Today that the government had no plans to seek a reopening of the cases against the president in Switzerland. “Why should we write a letter to the Swiss authorities? The president enjoys immunity and no cases can be opened, registered or prosecuted against the president,” he said. A full bench of the Supreme Court last week had rejected the review petition by the government in the NRO case. In its verdict given in 2009, the court had directed the attorney general to write a letter to the Swiss magistrate asking that the previous letter written by former attorney general Malik Mohammed Qayyum be shelved and cases against President Zardari be reopened.
President Zardari enjoys indemnity under Article 248 of the constitution and according to a legal expert the president cannot be prosecuted in a new or old case as long as he holds the office of the head of state. However, another expert said there was no legal clause that barred the government from writing a letter to the Swiss authorities to reopen the cases against the president as this would not mean that the president would also be prosecuted. Dr Khalid Ranjha said the government viewed the court verdict as biased because the Presidency claimed that there was no case against the president. “If the attorney general writes a letter, it would be tantamount to admission that there were cases of corruption against the president. Now the government claims that there is no case so there is no reason for writing a letter to Swiss authorities,” he added.
Asked what, in his view, was the situation, Dr Ranjha said the NRO saga had made a mockery of the country. “Once the attorney general wrote to withdraw cases against a person. Now how can his successor write contrary to this? This would be mutual embarrassment,” he added. Former chief justice Saeeduz Zaman Siddiqui said those individuals who had initially benefited from the NRO and got themselves cleared from the courts using their influence could be prosecuted by the court under Article 184(3) of the constitution. “I suppose that the apex court has already taken notice of such cases under which influential politicians have got benefit of their positions and they have been cleared by courts as the prosecutors refused to contest the cases and said they had no evidence against them. I think the court has already formed a commission to review all such cases which shady characters have been cleared,” he added.