Future petitions against NAB be heard by single bench: LHC

RAWALPINDI: A division bench of Lahore High Court (LHC) Rawalpindi Bench Friday ruled that in future all constitutional writ petitions against the NAB be heard by a single bench and not the divisional bench.

Justice Jawad Hassan, along with J Tariq Bajwa, issued a detailed judgment, directing all judicial registrars of high court that the long practice followed by them to fix any NAB writ before the DB carried no foundation and only the appeals against the accountability court filed under Section 32 of the NAB Ordinance 1999 could be fixed, as the section clearly stated that. But in that law or on the amended 26th Amendment, it’s only the single judge in which the LHC Rules & Orders Volume 5 chapter 3 part B stated that only single judge and not DB except where the Rule says or the CJ orders.

The division bench relied on all the reported judgments of single judge against the actions of NAB in 2020 in which justice Jawad Hassan back in 2020 passed a detailed order in single bench on the cases of Al Arabia Sugar Mills filed by Nusrat Shahbaz, etc; another case of Ramzan Sugar Mills filed by Sharifs, then when PTI was ruling; another case of Younis Kidwai and AZ Ahmed of JJVL very close to Asif Zardari but in all cases the orders of single judge were implemented by the NAB and the SECP never challenged.

The division bench also ruled that fixing writ with DB will affect the litigant’s right to file ICA, instead they will then approach the Supreme Court which was being overburdened.