MUZAFFARABAD, July 26: The Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) High Court has suspended two separate orders of Legislative Assembly Speaker Sardar Ghulam Sadiq whereby he had accepted ‘resignations’ of five MLAs, supporting a no-confidence resolution against Prime Minister Chaudhry Abdul Majeed.
“The orders passed by the Speaker on July 23 and 24 are suspended till further orders,” announced the full court, after hearing final arguments on Friday on a petition filed by 11 MLAs.
The membership of the petitioners would remain intact till the final judgment of the court, which was reserved.
The full court was led by Chief Justice Ghulam Mustafa Mughal and comprised five other judges. Only Justice Chaudhry Munir, who also holds the charge of chief election commissioner, did not sit on the bench.
During the proceedings, the court also heard arguments from both sides as to who was competent to summon the session in the event of submission of a no-confidence resolution against the prime minister.
While the counsel for the petitioners, Raja Hanif Khan, argued that it was speaker’s responsibility to summon the session, Abdul Rashid Abbasi, appearing on behalf of the speaker, maintained that the responsibility in this particular situation had to be carried out by the president.
Mr Abbasi said since the prime minister was a party in a no-confidence resolution, routing of the summary for summoning of the session could witness delays and that was why the authors of the constitution and rules had kept him out of the job.
On the other hand, Mr Hanif pleaded that in view of rule 17 (1) of the Rules of Procedure there was no hurdle in the way of the court to direct the speaker to summon the session.
However, later the petitioners withdrew their plea for a direction to the speaker to summon the session for voting on the no-confidence motion on the grounds that the said resolution had been withdrawn by the movers from the assembly secretariat.
Nevertheless, later on Friday afternoon, the Legislative Assembly Secretariat received an order from the president’s office, whereby the session had been summoned at 10am on Saturday.
A spokesman for the president told Dawn that the president had convened the sessions on the advice of the prime minister. The spokesman said he did not know the purpose of the session.
The assembly secretariat sources told Dawn that they had also received, by fax, an application from MLAs Abdul Majid Khan and Muhammad Hussain Sargala for withdrawal of the no-confidence resolution they had submitted earlier this week.
Taking strong exception to the summoning of session, Barrister Sultan Mahmood, who was named in the resolution as successor to the incumbent premier, alleged that the government had done it with mala fide intentions.
“There is no point of convening the session after the withdrawal of the no-confidence motion. Any proceedings on Saturday vis-à-vis the non existent no-trust motion will be unlawful and unconstitutional,” he said.
He claimed that the resolution had been pulled back on the intervention of PPP central leadership which had been apprised of the sentiments of party workers in AJK.
Separately, Majid Khan told Dawn that Faryal Talpur, who looks after the affairs of the Peoples Party in AJK, had summoned a meeting of parliamentary party on July 29 on this issue.