Panama case parties on the tenterhooks

ISLAMABAD: A fiercely-contested case that experienced nonstop daily pitched political battles, full of fallacious interpretations, innuendos and shallow claims, between the major contenders eventually stands wrapped up, with every side awaiting the Supreme Court judgment with bated breath.

This will certainly be an agonising wait for the competitors, who all want to win to give a fillip to their political gains, eying the 2018 general elections. Bearing in mind the voluminous documents spanning over 26,000 pages, high profile political nature of the case of first of its kind involving the prime minister, and complications caused by the stands taken by the combatants and the material (non-material) offered by them, the judges have to take a considerable time to reach a conclusion. The time spent by the justices in penning down their historic decision will keep adding to the anguish and sufferings of the petitioners and defendants.

The remarks of Justice Asif Saeed Khosa, who led the five-member bench, on the last day of hearing, definitely underlined the poor quality of documentary evidence given to the panel. His observations also reflected the difficulties being faced by the justices in arriving at the final determination on the basis of the material produced before them. “If we start rejecting unverified documents, 99.99pc of the papers will be thrown away. Then we will be back to the same situation and no progress will be made. Documents of both sides will be examined on the same basis. If the bench does not entertain the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) papers, the Sharif family’s documents will also not be accepted on the same yardstick.”

The senior judge passed these observations when PTI lawyer Naeem Bokhari insisted that the evidence produced by the Sharif family was not trustworthy and truthful and needed to be discarded. "We will decide this case only by the law; such that people will say, 20 years down the line, that this judgment was made by the book," the justice remarked.

The predicament that the panel faced from day one kept haunting even on the last day of the proceedings – how a decision can be pronounced relying on the unproven, unverified and unsubstantiated documents. There was not a single day in the exhausting hearings when the justices did not point out this fact loudly, telling all the parties that they should come out with authenticated papers to prove their case.

Justice Sheikh Azmat Saeed told Bokhari that the lawyer said that the documents with Maryam's signatures were correct, but the Sharif family said they were bogus. The assistance of an expert should have been sought in light of reservations concerning the validity of the documents, the bench further told him.

It also noted that the court would have accepted the testimony of an expert and Justice Ijaz Afzal asked how the panel could accept documents without looking into their validity. Justice Khosa said none of the documents submitted by the parties had come from verifiable sources.

Hardly any case being heard by the top court was ever so much politicised in the sense that its parties held daily pressers trying in their way to take political benefits and to influence the justices. They held not only presser but two or three news conferences every day apart from showering their pearls of wisdom during noisy TV talk shows in the evenings and nights.

Every day, the overenthusiastic ‘sages’ handed down their judgments, favouring their cause and rejecting their rivals’ stand. The PTI and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) assigned the task of articulating their respective views to special squads. Jamaat-e-Islami Chief Sirajul Haq also “performed well” in terms of attending the daily hearings and by holding pressers where he made high-sounding declarations.

At no stage did the judges impose any curbs on the political competitors to comment on the proceedings in their own peculiar way. However, the justice did ask them to observe restraint for a couple of times, a call which went absolutely unheeded as every side thought that regardless of the ruling their propaganda was serving their political purposes and swaying the public opinion in their favour.

In the absence of any court order to the contrary, the case was bound to be discussed and debated widely and freely in the political arena by all and sundry for the mere fact that it was against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his three children, Maryam, Hussain and Hassan. But some TV showmen, called anchors, crossed all limits by holding their own courts not only on the days the hearings were held but on other days as well, basing their “definite judgments” on the remarks and observations of the judges and the half-baked, unreliable documents handed over to the bench.

Apart from the premier, the PTI focused its attack on Maryam for the obvious reason - she is preparing to enter the political field in the next general elections and is being groomed by her father as his heir-apparent. It tried to damage her via this case. However, on the public front her team kept aggressively responding to the PTI onslaught and inside the courtroom her lawyer defended her forcefully.

After the failed attempt to lock down Islamabad on Nov 2 last, PTI Chairman Imran Khan was forced to give up his disastrous politics of sit-ins. Since then, he is in no position any such inane calls because his ‘street power’ has been fully exposed. After the botched protest, he was left with no option but to focus on the hearings against the prime minister and the members of his family. While he continued to attend the proceedings by sitting there for hours, he did not present the record of foreign funding to his party in the nearby building of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), which kept hammering him for not being forthcoming.

He also did not bother to go to the National Assembly sessions, which were held a few steps away. Thus, his entire politics revolved around this case and its final outcome.

As usual, he has repeatedly declared that whatever the judgment is he will accept it, but his word is hardly dependable because he masters in changing his stands when the court findings do not support his case.