Daily Times

LAHORE: A division bench of the Lahore High Court (LHC) Wednesday suspended the single bench order of striking down the devolution of Shaikh Zayed Postgraduate Medical Institute (SZPMI) to the Punjab government and also discarded all the appointments, including chairman of the institution, made by the province. The single bench comprising Justice Muhammad Farrukh Irfan Khan on June 16 issued the order while hearing a number of petitions challenging an order issued by the cabinet division in 2012 on the directives of the then prime minster for transferring administrative control of the institute along with its components, assets, liabilities and staff, etc, from the federal government to the provincial government of Punjab. The petitioners had also challenged the working of the hospital under a trust. The single bench had held that the impugned notification of 2012 issued by the then prime minister did not carry legal sanction behind it and as such it was liable to be struck down on the constitutional plane. The single bench also held that the government had failed to show any nexus of the ‘trust’ with the SZPMI or to show that the ‘trust’ was instrumental in any activity involved in the creation of the institute in question. The court declared illegal all the appointments, including the chairman of the institute, which were made by the provincial government after the purported devolution. The Punjab government, however, moved an inter court appeal against the single bench order. The appellate counsel claimed that the single bench decision was “tantamount to interference in the government’s policy matters, which it could not do”. He requested the court to declare the single bench order unconstitutional.

Published in Daily Times, June 22nd, 2017.