By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court on Pakistan moved on Thursday to reassert judicial authority over conditions inside Adiala jail, ordering the prison’s superintendent, Punjab’s home secretary and both the Islamabad and Punjab advocate generals to respond within three weeks to a petition challenging what lawyers describe as the systematic denial of Imran Khan’s right to meet with his legal team.
The case, brought by Salman Akram Raja, the PTI’s secretary general and one of the former prime minister’s principal advocates, centres on the Islamabad High Court’s decision last October to dismiss a contempt petition that had sought enforcement of that court’s own earlier directives on visitation rights. A three-judge bench comprising Justice Muhammad Ali Mazhar, Justice Musarrat Hilali, and Justice Shahid Bilal Hassan convened to take up the petition.
Raja’s appeal, filed under Article 185(3) of the Constitution, argues that the high court committed a fundamental error when it accepted, without verification, an oral assurance from the Adiala superintendent that earlier judicial directions had been complied with. According to the petition, the court made no attempt to call for the relevant record or examine whether agreed standard operating procedures for meetings between Khan and his legal team were actually in place. That reliance on an unverified verbal statement, the petition contends, “constitutes a miscarriage of justice and a failure to exercise constitutional jurisdiction.”
The argument cuts to a broader constitutional question that has overshadowed Khan’s imprisonment since he was first jailed in August 2023. Pakistan’s constitution guarantees, under Articles 4, 9, 10 and 10-A, the right to legal counsel, liberty, fair trial and due process. The petition argues that those rights “are integral and inviolable” and cannot be overridden by the administrative convenience of jail management. An earlier application by Khan’s team maintained that he had not had any meaningful meeting with his counsel since December 20, 2025 — a period of approximately three months and twelve days.
The petition also challenges the high court’s application of Rule 265 of the Pakistan Prison Rules 1978, arguing that subordinate legislation of that kind cannot, as a matter of constitutional principle, override fundamental rights or court orders issued under Article 199. The IHC’s own judgment of March 24, 2025, the petition notes, had set out “clear and unambiguous directions” regarding visitation rights that the executive authorities remained legally obliged to follow unless those directions were modified or set aside by a superior forum.
Justice Mazhar indicated from the bench that the panel would be unavailable the following week but directed that the appeal be scheduled for hearing within three weeks, and that the IHC’s October order be formally placed on record.
The case was listed for hearing following a meeting on 20 May between Chief Justice Yahya Afridi and Raja. Members of opposition parties had gathered outside the Supreme Court building before Thursday’s hearing, demanding that cases involving Khan be scheduled and that he be permitted to meet his family — a demonstration of the extent to which a matter rooted in procedural jail-access rules has come to carry substantial political weight.
The sister’s appeal
The same bench also heard a separate petition filed by Dr Uzma Khan, the former prime minister’s sister, who is challenging an IHC ruling that declined, among other things, to allow Khan access to his personal physicians. That IHC decision had also rejected requests to transfer Khan to Shifa International Hospital and to provide medical information to relatives.
The bench directed Dr Uzma to file a fresh application for early hearing along with a vakalatnama — a formal power of attorney — and indicated that once both documents were received, the registrar’s office would schedule the case. Advocate Uzair Karamat Bhandari, appearing for Dr Uzma, told the court that the appeal had sat without being assigned a case number for more than a month, and that a power of attorney signed by Khan himself had not been obtained in nearly two months.
Justice Mazhar asked whether the power of attorney was being submitted that day. Bhandari explained it had initially been unavailable, which was why the appeal was lodged using a special power of attorney instead.
Dr Uzma’s petition argues she has standing to bring the challenge not as a formal party to the original IHC proceedings, but as someone adversely affected by the judgment — a position supported, her lawyers say, by a Supreme Court precedent in H.M. Saya’s case, which permits persons aggrieved by an order to challenge it before the apex court even without having been party to the earlier proceedings.
Khan’s personal physician has said he could not verify claims about the former prime minister’s condition because he had not been granted direct access — a dispute that sharpened after a government-appointed team conducted an eye examination and reported improvement in Khan’s eyesight, a conclusion his family and PTI rejected as unilateral and unverifiable.
The petition requests that the IHC ruling be suspended pending the outcome of the appeal, and that the court order an immediate medical examination of Khan by physicians of his choice, naming four doctors — Khurram Mirza, Asim Yusuf, Faisal Sultan and Samina Niazi — by name. It argues that the denial of such access violates Dr Uzma’s own constitutional right to security of person under Article 9.
Khan has been imprisoned since August 2023. In a letter written to the chief justice last September, he described confinement in a nine-by-eleven-foot cell and said he had been denied access to books and newspapers. He is currently serving a fourteen-year sentence in the Al-Qadir Trust case, one of several convictions his party insists are politically motivated. He was 72 at the time of the letter.
Meanwhile, the Islamabad High Court has also ordered that Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi be given access to their legal counsel within seven days, after a senior barrister told the bench he had been prevented from meeting the former prime minister for months and had been unable to obtain so much as a signed power of attorney to pursue their appeals.
The intervention came on Thursday during a hearing of the couple’s challenges to their conviction in the £190 million Al-Qadir Trust case — one of the most politically charged prosecutions in Pakistan’s recent history. A division bench comprising IHC Chief Justice Sardar Muhammad Sarfraz Dogar and Justice Muhammad Asif directed the advocate general of Islamabad to ensure the meetings took place and that the necessary legal documents were signed, with proceedings adjourned until that has been done.
Imran, Pakistan’s former prime minister and founder of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, has been held at Rawalpindi’s Adiala jail since August 2023. He and Bushra were sentenced on 17 January last year — he to 14 years, she to seven — by an accountability court in Islamabad following a National Accountability Bureau reference alleging that the couple used their positions to benefit from a deal involving billions of rupees in assets returned to Pakistan by British authorities.
His barrister, Salman Safdar, told the bench on Thursday that he had last met Bushra in December and had been denied every subsequent request for access. He said he had not had meaningful access to Imran since November. Without a signed vakalatnama — the power of attorney required under Pakistani law to formally represent a client — he said he was effectively unable to act for either appellant.
“The jail authorities have denied me access in a manner that appears aimed at rendering these proceedings time-barred,” Safdar told the court, in remarks that drew a pointed response from the chief justice.
Justice Dogar acknowledged the seriousness of the allegation, saying that denial of access to legal counsel was “unfortunate” and risked impeding the administration of justice. He questioned why the advocate general was not present, observing that it was the law officer’s responsibility to ensure that counsel retained for court proceedings were permitted to see their clients.
Safdar was candid about the limits of his current mandate. He told the bench he had originally been instructed only in connection with applications seeking suspension of Imran and Bushra’s sentences, not the substantive appeals against their convictions. Those principal appeals have now been fixed for hearing and were listed before the court for the first time on 7 May, a date Safdar said he did not attend because he intended to challenge an earlier procedural order before the Supreme Court. An application to that effect was filed, he said, but had run into objections from the court office.
He acknowledged that without fresh instructions he could not effectively argue the appeals, adding pointedly that he had no objection if Imran wished to change his legal representative. “I have no instructions from Imran. He has the right to change his lawyer if he so desires,” he said.
The chief justice noted that the court had previously ordered that Safdar be allowed to meet his client, and that a meeting had subsequently taken place. He pressed the barrister on whether he held any valid power of attorney for the appeals — Safdar confirmed he did not — and questioned why another lawyer had not been engaged to seek one in the interim.
The NAB special prosecutor, Javed Arshad, sought to distance the bureau from the access dispute, arguing that questions of prison administration and powers of attorney lay outside its remit. The chief justice was unmoved, and instructed the prosecutor to ensure the documents were signed regardless.
Safdar also informed the court that Bushra was experiencing difficulties with her eyesight and that he needed to consult her before proceedings could advance.
The IHC subsequently scheduled the substantive hearing of both appeals for the final week of June, conditional on the access issue being resolved and the necessary authorisation documents executed.
The £190 million case
The Al-Qadir Trust reference centres on a 2019 settlement involving approximately £190 million — equivalent at the time to around Rs50 billion — that Britain’s National Crime Agency had seized from a Pakistani property developer and agreed to return to the Pakistani government. The NCA had been careful at the time to stress that its settlement with the developer was civil in nature and did not constitute a finding of criminal guilt.
NAB filed its reference in December 2023, with formal charges brought against Imran and Bushra on 27 February 2024. The bureau alleged that Imran, as prime minister, approved the settlement on 3 December 2019 without disclosing the terms of a confidential agreement, and that the couple subsequently received land and money from Bahria Town — the developer at the centre of the affair — in exchange for facilitating the deal. Both have denied wrongdoing.
The case has attracted sustained attention from human rights organisations and opposition figures, who argue that the prosecution is politically motivated. Pakistani courts have so far declined to suspend the sentences pending appeal.
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