Pakistan Top Court to Rule on Vote Against Prime Minister: Supreme Court Will Pick Up Imran Khan Case on Tuesday (Published 2022) (2024)

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As Pakistan fell deeper into a political crisis, the country’s Supreme Court on Monday heard a challenge to Prime Minister Imran Khan’s bid to remain in power, including his move to dissolve Parliament and call for early elections.

The hearing, which was adjourned and will resume on Tuesday, came a day after Mr. Khan and his allies blocked a no-confidence vote that had been widely expected to remove him from office. That brought accusations that the prime minister’s maneuverings were unconstitutional and leading the opposition coalition to seek immediate recourse from the justices.

The highly anticipated Supreme Court ruling is expected to determine whether the no-confidence vote can take place. But many saw the hearing as a fundamental test of the Constitution that will have far-reaching implications for Pakistan’s democracy.

Early Monday afternoon, a sea of journalists, lawyers and lawmakers crammed into the courtroom, filling every seat and packing shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisles. Plastic bins and large suitcases filled with thick, yellowed law books spilled out from the attorney’s tables; portraits of chief justices of the court lined the marble walls.

Throughout the three-hour session there were several tense exchanges between Farooq H. Naek, former chairman of the Senate and a lawyer who is representing opposition parties; and the five-justice bench, led by Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial. The justices’ tone suggested that despite many constitutional experts’ views that the court would likely rule in favor of the opposition, the verdict was far from settled.

The justices are expected to issue a verdict in the coming days. Opposition leaders have warned that the longer the hearing drags on, the more time Mr. Khan and his allies have to try to weaken the opposition or hatch further plans to remain in power.

The crisis revives the prospect of political instability in Pakistan, a nuclear power where no prime minister has served a full five-year term.

Mr. Khan, 69, is a former cricket star who came to power on a nationalist platform and pledges to tackle corruption. His popularity has taken a hit in recent months as inflation has surged.

His relationship with Pakistan’s powerful military, which has ruled the country intermittently since its independence in 1947, soured after he refused to back the appointment of a new chief of the country’s intelligence agency last year.

Mr. Khan has claimed that the opposition is acting in concert with the United States government to oust him, accusing an American diplomat of issuing a threat to Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. American officials have denied any involvement in the campaign to remove Mr. Khan.

Already on Monday, Mr. Khan appeared to be trying to whip up public support and push ahead with his plans to hold early elections, taking steps to establish an interim government before the Supreme Court issues its verdict.

On Monday, Pakistan’s president, an ally of Mr. Khan, sent a letter to both Mr. Khan and to the leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, Shehbaz Sharif. The letter asked that they propose names for the interim prime minister of a caretaker government that would lead the country until general elections are held within 90 days.

Mr. Khan proposed the former chief justice Gulzar Ahmed — a populist judge who, like the prime minister, has professed to be on a mission to eradicate corruption — for the office of the caretaker prime minister. Mr. Ahmed retired from the Supreme Court in February.

Mr. Khan also called for a protest in the capital, Islamabad, to be held on Monday evening and accused opposition parties of trying to avoid elections out of fear of his party’s popularity.

“When elections are announced, what is the opposition doing in the Supreme Court?” he said on state-run TV.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan held a hearing on Monday to rule on Prime Minister Imran Khan’s move a day earlier to dissolve Parliament, which set the stage for a showdown over the country’s leadership, although the justices adjourned for the day without making a decision.

Opposition lawmakers argued that the dissolution amounted to an “open coup against the country and the Constitution.” Allies of Mr. Khan said that the court had no authority to intervene in the National Assembly’s business.

There are three possible outcomes from the hearing, which could last for days, if not longer:

• Opposition leaders hope that the court will quickly overturn Mr. Khan’s decision and order the vote of no-confidence, which had been scheduled for Sunday, to proceed immediately in Parliament.

• The court could choose a middle ground, determining that the governing party’s move was unconstitutional but opting not to restore the dissolved Parliament or to allow the no-confidence vote to take place.

• The court could decline to interfere in parliamentary proceedings, effectively upholding Mr. Khan’s actions and paving the way for early elections to be held within 90 days.

Many constitutional experts said that the Supreme Court was likely to rule against Mr. Khan’s move to dissolve the National Assembly. On Sunday, the court’s chief justice, Umar Ata Bandial, said that several justices had expressed concern about the situation, casting doubt over the constitutionality of Mr. Khan’s actions.

But the Supreme Court in Pakistan has often been pulled into the fray of the country’s politics.

“Our Supreme Court has a tainted past,” Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar, a lawmaker with the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, posted on Twitter. “From sanctifying military take overs, sending political leaders to gallows or assuming executive authority clearly out of their domain.”

Mr. Khan could also order members of the opposition be arrested, on the grounds that they were part of what he claims to be an American conspiracy to remove him from office. Mr. Khan has led a growing crackdown on dissent, and opponents have accused him of targeting opposition members under the pretext of an anticorruption campaign. Such arrests could reduce the majority that had seemed poised to oust Mr. Khan.

The longer the court takes to issue a verdict and the longer the political crisis drags on, the more time Mr. Khan will have to try to weaken the opposition before the next general election.

But if the political turmoil escalates, it is possible that the country’s powerful military — which has ruled Pakistan for periods of the country’s 75-year history — might intervene. Military leaders appeared to withdraw their support for Mr. Khan’s government last year, and in recent days, they have subtly signaled that they do not support Mr. Khan’s bid to stay in office.

“Historically, the longer such a constitutional deadlock carries on, the greater chances of some kind of military intervention,” said Yasser Kureshi, a postdoctoral fellow in constitutional law at the University of Oxford.

Opposition leaders in Pakistan reacted with outrage to Prime Minister Imran Khan’s move to dissolve Parliament, accusing him of high treason and subverting the country’s constitutional order.

Shehbaz Sharif, the leader of the opposition who was expected to become the interim prime minister if a vote of no confidence had succeeded, said Mr. Khan had violated the Constitution and called on Pakistan’s Supreme Court to intervene.

“It is nothing short of a high treason,” Mr. Sharif wrote on Twitter on Sunday, adding that Mr. Khan had “pushed the country into anarchy.”

“There will be consequences for blatant & brazen violation of the Constitution,” he continued.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the chairman of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, also said on Sunday that Mr. Khan had violated the Constitution and vowed that the opposition would not leave Parliament.

“We call on ALL institutions to protect, uphold, defend & implement the constitution of Pakistan,” Mr. Bhutto Zardari wrote on Twitter.

Maryam Nawaz Sharif, a daughter of the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and a leader of his political party, called for Mr. Khan and members of his government to be charged with high treason.

“They all must be tried under article 6,” Ms. Sharif tweeted, citing a section of the country’s Constitution that says anyone who tries to suspend or subvert the Constitution “shall be guilty of high treason.”

A spokesperson for the State Department said on Sunday that American officials were closely monitoring the situation in Pakistan.

Mr. Khan had previously accused the United States of planning to oust his government by backing the opposition’s vote of no confidence, an accusation that American officials have denied.

“When it comes to those allegations, there is no truth to them,” Ned Price, a State Department spokesman, said on Thursday.

Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, had also made a plea for unity among Pakistan’s political parties on Thursday as Mr. Khan was facing the no-confidence vote.

“China always follows the principle of noninterference in other countries’ internal affairs,” Mr. Wang said in a news conference, adding that “China sincerely hopes that all parties in Pakistan can maintain solidarity and jointly uphold development and stability.”

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation that is home to the world’s second-largest Muslim population, has for decades been a reluctant — if important — American partner in the campaign against terrorism.

But the country has drifted away from the United States under Prime Minister Imran Khan, particularly after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, where Pakistan was long accused of nurturing the Taliban and is a supporter of the Taliban regime that took over last year. Pakistan has also embraced a strategic partnership with China and closer ties with Russia.

For two decades after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Pakistan was ostensibly a U.S. partner in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban after the United States demanded that Pakistan choose sides. In exchange, Pakistan’s military won tens of billions of dollars in American aid.

But from the start, the relationship between the two countries was rife with divided interests, with Pakistan playing a double game: accepting American aid, while often backing the very militants that the United States was fighting.

The Pakistani spy agency provided planning assistance and training expertise to the Taliban throughout the Afghan war, American officials have said, and offered a haven to the Haqqani network, a militant organization responsible for some of the deadliest attacks against American troops in Afghanistan. After the Taliban seized power, Pakistani protégés in the Haqqani network took on key positions in the Afghan government.

Pakistan’s goal in Afghanistan was to create a sphere of influence to block its archnemesis, India, which, according to Pakistan, supports separatist groups operating from havens in Afghanistan to stir unrest in Pakistan.

During the Afghan war, the United States tolerated Pakistan’s duplicitous game because, given the choice, American officials preferred fighting a chaotic war in Afghanistan to falling out with a nuclear-armed Pakistan. Pakistan’s ports and airfields offered critical entry points and supply lines for American military equipment needed in Afghanistan.

But the U.S. relationship with Pakistan cooled after Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 at a safe house located near a Pakistani military academy.

China, a longtime patron of Pakistan, has invested heavily in Pakistani infrastructure. China is also counting on Pakistan to serve as its facilitator in Afghanistan, home to millions of dollars’ worth of rare earth minerals that have piqued China’s interests, analysts say. Mr. Khan, in trying to establish closer ties with Moscow, also visited President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia hours before the invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Khan intended to push for a multibillion-dollar gas pipeline to be built by Pakistani and Russian companies, according to news reports in Pakistan.

If Mr. Khan is ousted, many experts on the region say that Pakistan could grow closer to the United States and the West. Over the past three years, Pakistan’s military, which has historically determined the country’s foreign policy and security priorities, has often disagreed with Mr. Khan’s views on distancing from the United States, analysts say. Those differences contributed to Mr. Khan’s relationship with the military souring in the latter part of his tenure.

The day before the no-confidence vote was planned to take place, the chief of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, voiced a desire to deepen ties with both China and the United States, and condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Imran Khan was elected as Pakistan’s prime minister in 2018 when he ran as a nationalist promising to fight corruption, revive the country’s struggling economy and maintain an independent foreign policy that distanced Pakistan from the United States.

Born to an affluent family in Lahore and educated at Oxford University, Mr. Khan, 69, first rose to international prominence in the late 1970s on the cricket pitch and became a regular in London’s fashionable crowd. In 1995, he married a British heiress, Jemima Goldsmith.

A year later, Mr. Khan tried to parlay his popularity from cricket — he had led Pakistan in 1992 to its only World Cup triumph — into a political career, establishing his own party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or the Movement for Justice. As a politician, he painted a picture of himself as a reformer offering an alternative to Pakistan’s entrenched political dynasties.

For over a decade, Mr. Khan struggled to make political inroads and was mocked for his political ambitions. But by 2011, he began to gather political momentum, drawing hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis to his rallies. Many were energized by his populist, anticorruption and anti-American message.

By then, the former international playboy had embraced a pious form of Islam and sought to transform his personal image. In 2018, Mr. Khan got married for a third time, to his spiritual adviser, Bushra Bibi. (His marriage to Ms. Goldsmith had ended in divorce, and he was briefly married in 2015 to a broadcast journalist, Reham Khan.)

After winning the backing of military leaders, Mr. Khan became prime minister in 2018. Many of his rivals accused the military of manipulating the election in his favor — an accusation Mr. Khan and the military have both denied. He ushered in a new foreign policy, moving away from the United States and closer to Russia and China.

Mr. Khan’s relatively stable tenure began to unwind late last year, as dissatisfaction with his handling of the economy came to a head and a dispute with the military over its leadership appeared to cost him its support.

The critical blow for the leadership of Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan came last year, when he appeared to lose the backing of the country’s powerful military.

This undercut his political stability at a time when there was already growing dissatisfaction with Mr. Khan’s government. Double-digit inflation has sent the prices of basic goods soaring and fueled criticism that he was failing to deliver on his touchstone promises of reviving the economy and creating an Islamist welfare state.

A cricket star turned politician, Mr. Khan’s break with the military came over his effort to place a loyal aide and former spy chief, Lt. Gen. Faiz Hamid, in charge of the army over the objections of the top brass. The military’s initial backing of Mr. Khan is widely thought to be a major reason for his rise to power in 2018, though Mr. Khan and military officials have denied that the military played any role in his election.

Then, in March, the opposition said it would move to vote Mr. Khan out of office and began courting allies in his party. In just a few weeks, his governing coalition splintered and some members of his party defected, appearing to give the opposition the simple majority it needed in the 342-member National Assembly to remove him from office.

Still, Mr. Khan staunchly refused to step down ahead of the vote despite mounting calls for his resignation. Instead, he has held a series of rallies to whip up public support, accused his opponents of being pawns in a conspiracy by the United States to topple his government and made claims of a plot to assassinate him.

So far, Mr. Khan has not offered Parliament or the news media evidence to support his claims of a conspiracy, and American officials have denied the accusations.

If he’s ousted, Mr. Khan would have a familiar fate: No prime minister has completed a full five-year term in Pakistan, now a nuclear-armed country of 220 million people.

Many analysts expect that even if Mr. Khan loses the no-confidence vote, he may seek to return to Parliament as a member of the opposition in the next general election, which is set for 2023 but could be held sooner.

Hours after Prime Minister Imran Khan declared the National Assembly dissolved on Sunday, preventing a no-confidence vote that seemed sure to oust him, opposition leaders challenged the move before Pakistan’s Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court began hearing the petition on Monday, and adjourned to pick it up again on Tuesday. The court could declare Mr. Khan’s move unlawful and allow the vote to proceed.

Should that happen, it is far from clear what Mr. Khan would do next.

Some analysts in Pakistan speculated that he might have members of the opposition arrested, on the grounds that they were part of what he claims to be an American conspiracy to remove him from office. Mr. Khan has led a growing crackdown on dissent, and opponents have accused him of targeting opposition members under the pretext of an anticorruption campaign.

One lawmaker from Mr. Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf party, Kanwal Shauzab, said that arresting opposition members was a “possibility” as long as it was done “in accordance with the law of the land.”

“We are not going to go after the opposition without any reason. It’s what they have done. They have to pay for their own deeds,” she added.

Such arrests could reduce the majority that had seemed poised to oust Mr. Khan. But his move Sunday seemed to risk costing him supporters of his own. One outspoken lawmaker from his party, Aamir Liaquat Husain, resigned in protest, joining dozens of members of Mr. Khan’s coalition who have defected in recent weeks.

Trying to head off such defections, the interior minister said that Tehreek-e-Insaf had the support of Pakistan’s institutions in dissolving the legislature — an apparent reference to the military, whose backing is considered critical to the survival of Pakistan’s civilian governments.

Military leaders had appeared to withdraw support from Mr. Khan late last year after a dispute over its leadership. They have maintained that the military remains neutral in the current political crisis.

But a spokesman for the army denied that it had been involved in or supported Sunday’s developments. It was the first time military leaders had so openly suggested that they did not support Mr. Khan’s bid to stay in office. To some, it raised the possibility of military intervention — a familiar pattern in Pakistan’s history — should the political crisis drag on.

The turmoil in Pakistan, where Prime Minister Imran Khan is clinging to power, has created an opportunity for the populist leader to whip up support among his base, which he galvanized to get elected in 2018.

He has lost the backing of the parties that formed his coalition, and he appears to have fallen out of favor with the military, who backed his ascension. With few allies left, he ordered Parliament dissolved on Sunday after a no-confidence vote against him was blocked.

It is a familiar role for Mr. Khan, who rose to prominence by rallying hundreds of thousands of middle-class people from urban areas and educated young people who were unhappy with politicians they viewed as corrupt and ineffective. Many were energized by his populist, anti-corruption and anti-American message, and they believed Mr. Khan offered a promising alternative to the entrenched political dynasties that voters associate with the other leading parties.

As recently as last week, he gathered tens of thousands of supporters in Islamabad for a rally that they said was one of the biggest political gatherings in the country’s capital in recent memory. It is a reminder of his continued ability to muster popular enthusiasm, despite what appears to be waning support from the military.

Now, instead of targeting political rivals in Pakistan to fuel his supporters, Mr. Khan is focusing on the United States, asserting that its government is behind a conspiracy to oust him from power. He may be setting the stage to animate his supporters, whom he will need if early elections take place.

“In the recent crisis, Khan has managed to whip up his support base again,” said Arifa Noor, an Islamabad-based political analyst.

Already, there are signs Mr. Khan is plotting out his path to win those elections by securing popular support and local political support, particularly in Punjab, the country’s most populous and prosperous province.

In the 2018 election, Mr. Khan’s political party, Tehreek-e-Insaf, made huge gains in Punjab. And he will be a strong competitor there if early elections are held, Ms. Noor said.