By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Imran Khan’s family and party filed a contempt of court petition against prime minister and a string of senior officials on Saturday, accusing them of defying a Supreme Court order that directed the jailed former leader be moved to a private hospital for treatment.
The petition, lodged on behalf of Khan’s sister, Dr Uzma Khan, names Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, information minister Attaullah Tarar, law minister Azam Nazeer Tarar, Islamabad’s chief commissioner, the interior secretary, the inspector general of prisons and the superintendent of Adiala jail, where the former prime minister has been held since August 2023.
It follows a chaotic 48 hours in which the government appeared, by its own officials’ account, to prepare for Khan’s transfer to Shifa International Hospital in Islamabad, only for him to be taken instead to the state-run Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) in the early hours of Friday, before being returned to prison the same morning.
The Supreme Court had ordered on Tuesday that Khan, 73, be moved to Shifa International within 48 hours for examination and treatment by a multidisciplinary medical board, and that he be permitted to remain there until 16 September, subject to the board’s recommendations. The three-judge bench, headed by Justice Shahid Waheed, also directed that Dr Uzma Khan and Khan’s personal physician, Dr Faisal Sultan, be present throughout the medical process.
None of that happened as ordered, according to the petition filed by Supreme Court advocate Uzair Karamat Bhandari.
‘Only a few hours of drama’
Dr Uzma Khan told reporters she was taken to PIMS in the early hours of Friday, where she was permitted to see her brother. Dr Sultan, meanwhile, was driven separately to Shifa International, where he waited for close to three hours before leaving once it became apparent Mr Khan would not be brought there.
The petition alleges that the medical examination which did take place at PIMS fell far short of what the court had ordered, describing it as a routine eye check, an eye injection and a blood pressure reading, rather than the full assessment by a medical board that judges had specified.
Salman Akram Raja, PTI’s secretary-general, who accompanied the petition to the Supreme Court registry on Saturday, was blunt in his assessment when he spoke to a local television channel. “There was no road closure or security threat,” he said. “A convoy departed Adiala jail and went to Shifa International, taking Dr Faisal Sultan. People thought it was Khan sahib. This is a completely choreographed drama.”
He rejected the idea that the decision to file the petition, rather than pursue it politically, was anything other than procedural. “It was a professional decision taken by Dr Uzma Khan’s lawyer after taking the situation into account,” he said, adding that naming the prime minister and senior ministers reflected legal necessity rather than political calculation.
Asked why interior minister Mohsin Naqvi had not been included among the respondents, Raja said that was a decision for Bhandari alone, based on the evidence available. “If Mohsin Naqvi is not involved in the decision-making, or if there is no evidence of his involvement, then he has not been named as a party,” he said, adding that further names could be added if new evidence emerged.
Raja also dismissed suggestions that the petition would have been heard sooner had it been filed a day earlier. “It isn’t slated for hearing immediately,” he said, noting that Dr Uzma Khan had only returned from PIMS at around 6am on Friday and reached Bhandari by 9am, too late to file before the Friday cut-off. “Even if it were filed, it would be heard by next week at the earliest, and it will be the same for this case.”
The petition dismisses the government’s security justification as “devoid of merit,” pointing to the fact that Dr Sultan’s convoy, which onlookers had been led to believe was carrying Khan, reached Shifa International and returned to Adiala jail without incident. It notes, too, that the court had already directed the authorities to arrange adequate security at the private hospital for the duration of Khan’s treatment there.
The document, filed under the heading of “wilful, deliberate and contumacious disobedience,” argues that the Tuesday order left no room for interpretation. “The directions contained in the Aug 18 orders were clear, unambiguous, unequivocal and fully capable of implementation,” it states, noting they were issued with both the Islamabad advocate general and the additional attorney general present in court. It goes on to argue that the filing of a review petition — which the government did submit, only for it to be returned by the registrar’s office on Thursday over procedural deficiencies — does not suspend the force of a court order or excuse non-compliance with it.
The petition draws on precedent from the Supreme Court’s rulings in the Adnan A. Khawaja and Yousuf Raza Gilani cases, arguing that ultimate responsibility for failing to implement a court order rests with the chief executive — in this case, the prime minister.
It asks the court to issue show-cause notices to each of the respondents, to compel their personal appearance, to hold them in contempt and punish them accordingly, and to order Mr Khan’s immediate transfer to Shifa International for the examination originally directed. It also asks that a court officer or local commission be appointed to oversee compliance.
A former prime minister behind bars
Khan, who has been in custody for more than three years, remains one of Pakistan’s most closely watched political figures despite his enforced absence from public life. He served as prime minister from 2018 until April 2022, when he was removed from office in a parliamentary no-confidence vote — a move he has consistently characterised as a plot orchestrated by political rivals in collaboration with the military, a charge both parties reject.
He has faced more than a hundred legal cases since leaving office, spanning corruption allegations and charges connected to unrest among his supporters following his brief arrest in May 2023. Nearly all of the resulting convictions have since been suspended or overturned on appeal, with the exception of a 14-year sentence handed down in the Al-Qadir Trust land corruption case, which he continues to contest. He denies all wrongdoing.
His deteriorating eyesight has been a recurring concern since January, when he was diagnosed with right central retinal vein occlusion, a condition affecting blood flow in the eye. He has been taken to PIMS on several occasions since for related treatment.
The episode has also opened a rift within Pakistan’s legal establishment. Eight members of the Pakistan Bar Council — including Mr Raja himself — issued a statement on Saturday condemning what they called a “blatant, wilful and deliberate violation” of the court’s order, warning that the episode amounted to “a serious assault on the independence, authority and dignity of the judiciary.”
“If the executive can simply disregard an order of the SC, then the constitutional separation of powers is rendered meaningless,” the statement said, pointing to a passage in the court’s own Tuesday ruling that had explicitly addressed the consequences of non-compliance.
The signatories drew a pointed comparison with the treatment of Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister who was permitted to travel abroad for medical treatment under a previous court order, asking whether “the constitutional protection of life, health, dignity and access to medical treatment is to be applied selectively depending upon the political circumstances of the individual concerned.”
But the council’s vice-chairman, Pir Muhammad Masood Chistie, moved swiftly to distance the institution from the statement, noting it had been issued by only eight of the council’s 23 members and did not represent its collective position. “In an institution governed by democratic principles, the minority cannot dictate the position of the majority,” he said, adding that the council “must remain above political interests and personal agendas.”
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