Pak CJ orders Sharif return

Pakistan’s Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry today ordered the government to allow Nawaz Sharif to return...

Pakistan’s Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry today ordered the government to allow Nawaz Sharif to return home, saying its deportation of the former Prime Minister in September violated an earlier court ruling.

Hundreds of Sharif’s supporters clapped and shouted slogans against President Pervez Musharraf outside the Supreme Court after the order. Sharif is in forced exile in Saudi Arabia and his wife Kulsoom is in New Delhi where she underwent knee surgery at the Fortis Hospital today.

Chaudhry also accused Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz of disobeying the Supreme Court’s orders when Sharif was put onto a plane to Saudi Arabia on September 10, hours after ending his seven-year exile.

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The court was told that it was Shaukat Aziz who directed the Foreign Ministry to arrange Sharif’s deportation despite a Supreme Court ruling that he had right to stay in Pakistan.

“By September 6 arrangements were being made to violate the order of this court … by the prime minister of Pakistan,” Chaudhry said after hearing a statement from two senior Foreign Ministry officials and testimony from the chairman of Pakistan International Airlines.

“The judgement passed by this court is very much intact… and is required to be implemented in letter and spirit,” Chaudhry said as he adjourned a hearing on appeals against the deportation until November 8. “There was a clear-cut violation of our judgement.”

Sharif’s party said earlier this month that he would make a fresh attempt to come home in November, following the return from exile on October 18 of his political rival and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

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Musharraf has been at loggerheads with the increasingly independent court since his botched attempt in March to sack Chaudhry, a move that sparked mass protests.