ISLAMABAD: The Islamabad High Court (IHC) has stayed the in-camera trial of former prime minister Imran Khan in the state secrets case, his lawyer said on Thursday, saying the court had taken note of the “patent miscarriage of justice” against his client.
A special court established to hear the case, also known as the “cipher” reference, had been conducting the trial inside the Adiala prison in Rawalpindi for weeks without media or members of the public allowed before the IHC ruled the hearings illegal last month and ordered them restarted in an open court.
Khan’s legal team objected to the trial, stating that only a few journalists were allowed to attend proceedings of the case. On Dec. 14, the special court accepted a plea filed by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) which requested an in-camera trial of the former premier. Khan, whose party has been demanding an open trial, had challenged the decision in the IHC.
“The Islamabad High Court has stayed the cipher trial on account of the patent miscarriage of justice pointed out by me in the petition filed on behalf of Imran Khan Sahib,” his lawyer Salman Akram Raja wrote on social media platform X.
Khan is serving a three-year sentence at Adiala jail in a separate case in which he was convicted in August for failing to disclose assets earned from the sale of state gifts while he was PM from 2018-2022.
The cipher case against him relates to an alleged diplomatic correspondence between Washington and Islamabad that the former prime minister says was proof that his ouster as PM in a parliamentary vote of no-confidence in April 2022 was part of a US conspiracy to remove him.
Washington has repeatedly denied Khan’s accusations.
According to the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, IHC’s Justice Aurangzeb asked the government’s lawyer today, Thursday, why the special court was holding in-camera proceedings when the IHC had ordered an open trial.
“Security is not the court’s jurisdiction and we won’t interfere in this,” Aurangzeb said.
Attorney General Mansoor Usman Awan responded that only the testimonies of the witnesses were being held in-camera rather than the entire trial.
Awan said the testimonies of 25 witnesses were to be recorded in the case out of which the statements of 13 had been recorded while two witnesses had been cross-examined.
The judge told Awan that from what he was describing, “this doesn’t look like an open trial to me”.
“You can’t tell people to come and go whenever you want to,” he was quoted as saying by Dawn.
The high court adjourned proceedings of the case till Jan. 11 and later, issued an interim order barring the special court from moving ahead in the case till the next hearing, Dawn said.
Pakistan’s Supreme Court last week granted Khan bail in the cipher case. However, the former prime minister is still in Adiala prison due to a slew of legal cases against him.
He remains disqualified from contesting national elections scheduled for Feb. 8 because of the corruption conviction, which a high court refused to suspend on Thursday.
The former prime minister denies all allegations against him, saying that charges are politically motivated to keep him and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) away from general elections on Feb. 8.
The military, whom Khan accuses of influencing the charges against him, strongly denies involvement.
