Pakistan HC adjourns Jadhav case to October 5

The Islamabad high court on Tuesday adjourned the hearing of a case related to the appointment of a counsel for Indian death row prisoner Khulbhushan Jadhav till October 5.The appointment of a lawyer for Jadhav remains one of the three contentious issues that has prevented India from participating in the review trial, the other two being the need for India to have unhindered consular access to Jadhav and also access to all case files. Pakistan has so far rejected India’s demand to appoint an Indian lawyer for Jadhav. India later asked for a Queen’s Counsel to represent Jadhav but that too was rejected.The attorney general of Pakistan, Khalid Jawed Khan, who represented the government during the hearing, sought postponement of the proceedings before a three-judge bench comprising chief justice of the HC Athar Minallah and Justices Aamer Farooq and Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb. The HC accepted the federal government’s plea and adjourned the hearing till October 5. The court also issued notice to the counsel of the Indian high commission to appear before the court on the next date of hearing. Recently, Pakistan’s national assembly had approved a bill to provide Jadhav the right of appeal in a civilian court against a sentence handed down to him by a military court.Pakistan had enacted an ordinance earlier to allow a review in keeping with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) judgment that called for an effective review and reconsideration of Jadhav's death sentence by a military court. For India to join the trial though, it’s important that Pakistan first provides what the government has called remedial consular access or access to Jadhav in private. India believes this is not a normal case of consular access as, unlike in other cases, in Jadhav’s case, the conviction has already taken place. Consular access is normally provided just after arrest. India has also repeatedly told Pakistan that access in private will be in keeping with the spirit of the ICJ judgment.Indian authorities have previously avoided responding in the Jadhav case. In April, counsel for the Indian high commission, barrister Shahnawaz Noon, who had appeared in the HC in a separate matter to request the court to dispose of the case related to four prisoners following their release, had argued that Pakistani courts had no jurisdiction to review the Jadhav case.Last month, the Islamabad HC had urged the Indian government to cooperate with the legal proceedings as it concerned the “life of a human being”. Jadhav, according to Pakistan, was arrested on March 3, 2016, from Balochistan’s Mashkhel area.

from Economic Times https://bit.ly/2SuljPJ
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