It will be a busy week for the highest court in Pakistan. Next week, it will hear a petition from former Islamabad High Court judge Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui against the SJC’s decision against him, as well as a plea from Justice Mazahar Ali Akbar Naqvi of the Supreme Court against the proceedings of the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC).
At a meeting on Thursday, a group of three top judges led by Chief Justice of Pakistan Qazi Faez Isa agreed to put the cases on the next calendar. The committee also made a bigger bench of nine people to take up the president’s request to review the verdict in the murder case of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Justice Naqvi went to the Supreme Court to fight two “show-cause” letters that the SJC had sent out about claims of financial misconduct. The judge said that the complaints that were sent to the SJC about him were politically driven.
Plus, next week there was going to be a meeting for another petition against the SJC’s work. Shaukat Siddiqui’s case will be heard on December 14 by a bigger bench of five judges led by Chief Justice Isa.
The judges’ committee also agreed to look into the president’s request to review a Supreme Court decision from 1979 that upheld the death sentence for former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The decision was made by a seven-member bench.
The case brought by Asif Zardari, who was president at the time, will be heard by a larger group of nine judges led by Chief Justice Isa on Tuesday, December 12. It has been eleven years since the last meeting, which is the seventh one in this case. There are nine judges on the wider bench: Justice Musrat Hilali, Justice Aminuddin Khan, Justice Jamal Mandokhel, Justice Muhammad Ali Mazhar, Justice Hasan Azhar Rizvi, and Justice Mansoor Ali Shah.
