By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The government is locked in an escalating legal and political dispute with the Supreme Court and the party of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan, after officials sidestepped a court order to move him to a private hospital and instead took him to a state-run facility for a few hours of tests before returning him to his cell.
The Islamabad chief commissioner has now filed a second petition asking the Supreme Court to review its own ruling of 18 August, which had directed that Khan be transferred from Adiala jail, on the outskirts of Rawalpindi, to Shifa International Hospital in the capital for examination and treatment. An earlier version of the challenge was rejected on procedural grounds by the court’s registrar’s office on Thursday and has now been refiled with the objections addressed.
Khan, the cricketer who became prime minister before being ousted in a no-confidence vote in April 2022, has been in custody since August 2023. He is serving a 14-year sentence over allegations that he concealed the value of state gifts he retained under the so-called Toshakhana scheme, and has separately been convicted in a corruption case involving the Al-Qadir Trust, worth an estimated £190 million. He and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party maintain that the prosecutions are politically motivated.
Concern over the 73-year-old’s health has been building for months. He has suffered from a serious eye condition, right central retinal vein occlusion, since it was first disclosed in late January, and has been taken to hospital for treatment on several occasions since. His family and party had long pressed for him to be examined by outside specialists, culminating in the Supreme Court’s intervention this week.
A three-judge bench led by Justice Shahid Waheed, sitting with Justice Naeem Akhtar Afghan and Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim, ruled on Tuesday that Khan should be taken to Shifa International within 48 hours for assessment by a specially convened medical board, which was to include his own physician, Dr Faisal Sultan, and his sister, Uzma Khan. The judges also ordered that he be allowed weekly meetings with his family and twice-weekly telephone calls with his sons, while directing that his family and party ensure no public gathering formed at the hospital.
That deadline expired on Thursday night. Rather than taking Khan to Shifa, officials instead brought him under heavy security to the government-run Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, known as Pims, where authorities say he underwent a medical check-up before being returned to Adiala jail. Information minister Attaullah Tarar said the decision to use Pims rather than Shifa was made because of security concerns, and that doctors had examined Khan and pronounced him medically fit.
That account has been sharply disputed by Khan’s family, his legal team and his party. Dr Sultan has said the medical team he was part of travelled towards Shifa International as instructed, only to be kept waiting for hours while repeatedly told that Khan was on his way. Eventually, he has said, they were told Khan might not be brought to the hospital at all, and the team learned only afterwards that he had been taken to Pims instead.
Uzma Khan has given her own account of the visit, saying only limited tests were carried out — a blood pressure check and an eye examination — and that her brother received an injection and had one eye bandaged overnight. She has also alleged that he has been denied adequate access to reading material, television and human contact during his imprisonment, and said he has repeatedly complained about conditions in jail and what he described as prolonged isolation. None of these claims has been independently verified, and government officials have continued to insist that Khan was properly examined and that doctors found no condition requiring urgent intervention.
PTI’s secretary general, Salman Akram Raja, who is also part of Khan’s legal team, has argued that the Supreme Court’s instructions were unambiguous and required Khan to be examined, and if necessary treated, at Shifa International for as long as doctors judged appropriate. The party has said it intends to pursue contempt of court proceedings against officials it accuses of defying the ruling. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s chief minister, Sohail Afridi, has gone further, questioning what confidence the public could have in the courts if state institutions felt able to disregard judicial orders, and pledging that PTI would keep up its campaign over the issue.
The government’s case for review rests on a series of legal arguments. Central to it is the contention that the court’s order overlooked Rule 197 of the Pakistan Prison Rules 1978, which the government says governs how and where a prisoner may be moved for medical treatment and makes no provision for admission to a private hospital. Prisoners, the petition argues, can lawfully be treated only in a jail hospital or, where necessary, a civil or district headquarters hospital — and allowing an inmate to be treated at a private facility of his own choosing would expose him to security risks and outside influence that the prison rules are specifically designed to prevent.
The petition also argues that the ruling breached the chief commissioner’s right to a fair hearing, since it was issued without him being made a party to the case or served with notice, which it says runs contrary to Article 10-A of the constitution. It further contends that the medical board’s report never described Khan’s condition as critical, and that the court ought to have sought the opinion of technical experts rather than reaching its own conclusion from the report alone.
A recurring theme in the government’s filings is the claim that granting Khan access to a private hospital would itself amount to unlawful discrimination. The petitions argue that Article 25 of the constitution guarantees equal treatment before the law and that the order, by giving one prisoner a concession not available to others, risks opening the door to similar demands across the prison system — undermining, in the government’s words, the entire structure of the criminal justice system. The filings also object to a separate provision allowing Khan two foreign telephone calls a week to his sons, arguing this breaches Rule 265 of the prison rules, and argue more broadly that the court granted final relief at what was only an interim stage of proceedings, contrary to normal legal practice.
On the question of jurisdiction, the government’s lawyers argue that the powers available to a court hearing a criminal appeal are strictly limited to those set out in the Code of Criminal Procedure — chiefly hearing the appeal itself, adjourning it, and admitting additional evidence — and do not extend to directing a prisoner’s transfer to a private hospital or the constitution of a specialist medical board. They further argue that Section 561-A of the code, which allows courts to prevent abuse of process in subordinate courts, has no bearing on matters of jail administration and cannot be used to bypass the separate remedies set out in the Prisons Act 1894, the Prisoners’ Act 1900 and the Prison Rules themselves.
The dispute has become the latest flashpoint in a broader standoff between PTI and the government that has simmered since Khan’s removal from office. The Supreme Court is next due to hear the matter on 16 September, by which point the review petition will need to have cleared the registrar’s office without further objection. Until then, both sides show little sign of stepping back: the government insists it followed proper procedure and that Khan’s health does not require private hospital care, while PTI maintains that a clear court order has simply not been obeyed.
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