By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Meetings between former prime minister Imran Khan and a small group of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf leaders were again blocked in Thursday at Adiala jail in Rawalpindi, even though the Islamabad High Court had directed prison authorities to allow the imprisoned politician twice-weekly visits with family members, lawyers and associates.
The court order, which specified meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays, has gone unimplemented for months, PTI officials said. On Thursday, six senior party figures arrived at the jail gates carrying an approved list of names submitted earlier by the party’s secretary general. They were turned away after waiting more than two hours. The visitors — Syed Raza Gillani, Tahir Iqbal, Mian Fayyaz Hussain, Qazi Ahmad Akbar, Mehwish Janjua and Abdul Hakeem Zareen — reached Adiala at 2 pm Prison officials told them to wait while higher approval was sought, according to Iqbal. “We were told that we would be allowed to conduct the meeting if approval was granted,” Iqbal said. “However, we remained there until 4:30 pm but no orders came for the meeting.”
He called the continued refusal “unfortunate,” noting that Salman Akram Raja, one of Khan’s lawyers, has filed a petition in the high court seeking enforcement of its own directive. A judge, Iqbal said, responded that the jail superintendent holds final authority over visits. “Unfortunately, there is no law, no constitution and no moral values in Pakistan,” he added. “A person has been in jail for over two years and his family is not being allowed to meet him. On the other hand, it is said that Pakistan is a democratic country.”
Khan, 74, has been held at Adiala since Aug. 5, 2023, after his arrest in connection with the concealment of details about official gifts he received while in office. He is serving a 14-year sentence in the £190 million corruption case, also known as the Al-Qadir Trust case, and faces additional charges in a related Toshakhana-II matter.
In a separate development Thursday, Khan’s sister, Aleema Khan, filed a writ petition in the Islamabad High Court alleging that her brother has been held in illegal solitary confinement for roughly 22 hours a day over the past six months. The petition, submitted through lawyers Barrister Salman Safdar and Salman Akram Raja, names as respondents the superintendent and deputy superintendent of Adiala jail, the inspector general of prisons for Punjab, the chairman of the National Accountability Bureau, the director general of the Federal Investigation Agency, the medical superintendent of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences and the state.
No court has ever sentenced Khan to solitary confinement, the petition argues, citing Section 73 of the Pakistan Penal Code and Rules 639 and 1019 of the Pakistan Prisons Rules, 1978. Those provisions allow solitary confinement only by judicial order and limit it to no more than 14 days at a time. The petition describes the prolonged isolation as “patently illegal, devoid of lawful authority, and amounting to inhuman and degrading treatment.”
It further contends that Khan has lost 85 percent of the vision in his right eye because of an unspecified ailment. He has been taken to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences on four occasions for treatment, the filing states, but neither family members nor legal counsel have been informed of the diagnosis or the precise course of care. Repeated injections have produced no improvement, and Khan has never been formally admitted to a hospital for comprehensive evaluation, according to the petition.
The document also alleges that the previous Adiala superintendent, Abdul Ghafoor Anjum, was transferred after showing “deliberate indifference” to Khan’s medical needs. During one of the limited court-mandated meetings with counsel, Khan reported that his wife, Bushra Bibi, who is imprisoned in the same facility, is being kept in solitary confinement for 24 hours a day.
The petition states that Khan is denied television, books and any other reading material, and that lawyers are routinely prevented from meeting him to discuss his cases or execute powers of attorney. Senior PTI officeholders, including the party chairman and secretary general, have also been barred from seeing him.
The petition invokes Articles 9 and 14 of Pakistan’s Constitution, which protect the right to life and dignity, and cites the United Nations Nelson Mandela Rules, which prohibit indefinite or prolonged solitary confinement as incompatible with human dignity. It asks the court to declare the arrangement unlawful and order an end to both the isolation and the incommunicado detention.
Over the past year, PTI leaders and members of Khan’s family have repeatedly raised alarms about his conditions at Adiala, saying the restrictions amount to a form of psychological pressure. Earlier this month, Safdar urged the high court to consider releasing his client on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, citing the extended solitary confinement and the eye infection.
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