, DawnNews reported.
The reference will now be sent to the Supreme Court.
President Zardari signed the reference in the presence of Law Minister Babar Awan and Sindh Home Minister Zulfikar Mirza, under Article 186 of the Constitution. Secretary to President Asif Hayat and Spokesperson Farhatullah Babar were also present, a press release said.
Spokesperson Farhatullah Babar said that the reference will now be sent to the Supreme Court by the law ministry. Early this week the federal Cabinet authorised President Zardari to send a reference to the Supreme Court on the matter, he said.
Article 186 of the Constitution states: (1) “If, at any time, the President considers that it is desirable to obtain the opinion of the Supreme Court on any question of law which he considers of public importance, he may refer the question to the Supreme Court for consideration”.
Clause 2 of the same Article states: “The Supreme Court shall consider a question so referred and report its opinion on the question to the President”.
Farhatullah Babar said that the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) had never intended to seek revenge but it wanted to put right a historic wrong and thereby vindicate the position of the founding Chairman of the party.
He recalled that a former judge of the bench of the Supreme Court which upheld the death sentence had subsequently publicly acknowledged that the split verdict was given under pressure from the dictatorship of the time.
The death sentence was awarded to Pakistan’s first directly elected Prime Minister by the Lahore High Court and subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court in March 1979 in a split verdict.
The former premier was executed on April 4, 1979 by the then military dictatorship disregarding appeals by world leaders and amid serious reservations by international jurists about the legal propriety of the death sentence.
The body of the premier was flown secretly to Larkana and was buried without permitting family members to attend the funeral and the last rites.
After Bhutto was hanged, the PPP had described the capital punishment awarded to its founding chairman in the Mahmood Raza Kasuri murder case as a judicial murder and vowed to get the verdict reversed through a review petition, but it did not materialise during its previous two terms in government
No comments:
Post a Comment