ISLAMABAD - Two judges of the Supreme Court will retire next year and both the judges hail from Khyber-Pakhtunkhawa.

Justice Dost Muhammad Khan will retire in March and Justice Ejaz Afzal in May 2018.

Justice Dost Muhammad had taken the oath as Chief Justice of the Peshawar High Court on November 17, 2011, before he was elevated to the Supreme Court on January 31, 2014.

As the chief justice of PHC, he delivered several major judgments, including terming drone strikes ‘war crimes’ and had ordered the government to raise the issue at the United Nations forum; a lifelong disqualification of former president Pervez Musharraf from contesting elections; declaring fuel adjustment charges illegal; taking suo motu notice of women being barred from voting and ordering missing persons be shifted to internment centres. His other achievements include introducing alternative dispute resolution system, online complaint system, and mobile courts.

In the Supreme Court, Justice Dost Muhammad wrote a separate note on military courts and was also part of a bench which had disallowed hunting of houbara bustard.

Justice Ejaz Afzal, who born on May 8, 1953, was appointed as the judge of the Supreme Court on November 17, 2011. He was the only judge of the Peshawar High Court, who stuck to the principled stance of an independent judiciary till he was restored along with former Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on March 16, 2009. He had refused to take the oath under the Provisional Constitutional Order on November 3, 2007.

Justice Ejaz was the head of the three-judge bench which had disqualified former prime minister Nawaz Sharif in the Panama papers case.