ISLAMABAD - The Islamabad High Court (IHC) Thursday restored the 10-year disqualification period for the convicts sentenced by the courts in the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) references under its accountability laws. In this regard, a division bench of IHC comprising Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani and Justice Saman Rafat Imtiaz issued stay orders while hearing the accountability watchdog’s application seeking suspension of a single bench’s verdict of limiting the disqualification to five years, since the National Accountability Ordinance (NAO) provides for 10-year disqualification for a convict. The bench issued the orders while accepting NAB’s application to suspend the single bench’s order about the disqualification of former Balochistan minister Mir Faiq Jamali and restore the 10-year disqualification period for the NAB convicts to contest elections.
During the hearing, the Special NAB Prosecutor appeared before the court and adopted the stance that the disqualification period starts from the time the convict is released from jail. He added that the PML-N ticker-holder Mir Faiq was awarded a 10-year disqualification. The prosecutor further said that the Supreme Court had upheld his sentence. He informed the bench that according to the NAB law, the disqualification will be for 10 years.
At this juncture, Justice Kayani said that the NAB official’s arguments did not address the question raised as the “sentence is not controversial”. He asked that whether the subsidiary legislation in the Constitution could be different from the interpretation given in it. To this, the prosecutor replied that the matter had been discussed in the Constitution’s Article 63 (disqualification of parliament members) in a “general” sense.