PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif’s appeals against his sentence in the Al-Azizia and Avenfield Apartments cases will start being heard by the Islamabad High Court (IHC) on November 27. This was decided on Tuesday.
The ruling was made by a division bench of the IHC made up of Chief Justice Aamer Farooq and Justice Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb.
The leader of the PML-N showed up at the IHC today with a large group of top PML-N leaders, including his brother and former prime minister Shehbaz Sharif. Security was tight.
Nawaz’s lawyer, Azam Nazir Tarar, said at the start of the meeting that his client wanted to make a case for the appeal against his conviction in the Avenfield case.
When the court asked how long Nawaz’s lawyer would need, they said it would take a few hours. The lawyer for the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), on the other hand, said he would not need much time.
Then, Justice Aamer Farooq said that the court would start hearing the cases on Monday. The hearing was then put off until November 27.
Nawaz and references to corruption
The Avenfield case found Nawaz Sharif guilty in July 2018, and the Al-Azizia case found him guilty in December of the same year. Afterwards, he made appeals against his judgment to the IHC.
But on June 24, 2021, the appeals were turned down by an IHC bench led by Justice Farooq because Nawaz had missed several meetings and hadn’t been in court.
In October 2019, Nawaz, who was serving a seven-year prison sentence for his part in the Al-Azizia case, was given the rare chance to get medical care in another country.
Even though he was summoned to court several times, the PML-N supreme leader refused to return to the country. As a result, both the IHC and an accountability court declared him a proclaimed criminal.
Since Nawaz was a “fugitive from the law,” the IHC said in its nine-page ruling on June 24, 2021, that he had lost his right to appear in court. The order said the court had no choice but to throw out his case.
But on October 19, 2023, both the IHC and the accountability court gave the former prime minister safe bail until October 24, 2023. This was so he could go back to Pakistan after living in London on his own for four years.
