ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s top judge, Chief Justice Asif Saeed Khosa, responded on Wednesday to recent statements made by Prime Minister Imran Khan against the judiciary and said that it was the government and not the courts that had permitted Nawaz Sharif to seek medical treatment abroad.
Earlier this month, Khan had said he was ready to let former political rival Sharif seek treatment abroad on humanitarian grounds. But the Lahore High Court rejected Khan’s demand that Sharif provides a $35.5 million indemnity bond to give surety that he would return to continue his seven-year jail term.
Following the court’s orders, PM Khan said during a speech at a ceremony in northwestern Pakistan, that there was a disparity in the way the powerful and weak sections of Pakistanis were treated in the country’s judicial system-- both with apparently separate sets of laws.
But in a scathing criticism of Khan’s remarks, Justice Khosa said:
“He [PM Khan] should know that the government themselves allowed somebody [Nawaz Sharif] to go abroad. The debate in the High Court was only over modalities. Please be careful [with such statements].”
"Do not taunt us for siding with 'the powerful'. Nobody is powerful before us [the judiciary] other than the law,” he added.
The Lahore High Court (LHC) had only set the modalities for Sharif’s departure, he said, but permission to travel abroad was granted to Sharif by the Prime Minister himself.
On Tuesday, Sharif finally flew out to London on a private jet for medical treatment, a month after he was released on medical bail from his prison sentence on graft charges.
Despite his conviction for corruption, Sharif remains popular among many Pakistanis, and his health has dominated newspaper front pages and TV channels in recent weeks. He denies all charges against him.
“I hope he comes back, but I don’t expect that he will,” Khan’s cabinet minister Fawad Chaudhry told a news conference on Tuesday.
