The Supreme Court will on Tuesday resume hearing a long-pending presidential reference seeking to revisit the 1979 controversial death sentence awarded to former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
A nine-member larger bench of the apex court is expected to take up the reference at 11:30am. The case proceedings will be broadcast live on the SC website.
Headed by Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Qazi Faez Isa, the larger bench consists of Justice Sardar Tariq Masood, Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah, Justice Yahya Afridi, Justice Amin-ud-Din Khan, Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhel, Justice Muhammad Ali Mazhar, Justice Syed Hasan Azhar Rizvi and Justice Musarrat Hilali.
The reference was filed on behalf of former president Asif Ali Zardari on April 2, 2011, for an opinion on revisiting the death sentence awarded to the former premier under the Supreme Court’s advisory jurisdiction.
It was filed before the top court under Article 186 (1 and 2) of the Constitution, which empowers the president to refer any question of public importance to the Supreme Court to seek its opinion on an issue.
The reference was last heard by an 11-judge panel, headed by then chief justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, in Jan 2012.
In March 1978, a four-member bench of Lahore High Court had awarded the death sentence to Bhutto, which was later challenged in the top court.
In a four to three split verdict, a seven-judge SC had bench upheld the sentence during the military regime of the then-army chief Gen Ziaul Haq in March 1979.
Ahead of the hearing, PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, Sherry Rehman and other senior party leaders arrived at the apex court.
‘Opportunity to undo grievous wrong’
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Aseefa Bhutto-Zardari said today was an opportunity for the SC to “undo a grievous wrong”. “Let us hope and pray the honorable justices exorcise that shame today,” she added.
A day earlier, while speaking to the media, Bilawal had also said that his “bare minimum” expectation from the SC was that it would expose all the individuals who were involved in the “crime”.
He added that those who had died could not be brought back but said he expected justice from the courts to “correct the past”.
Separately, PPP Senator Raza Rabbani had issued a statement on Monday, saying that the hearing was an “opportunity to correct a historic wrong”.
“The judicial murder of Shaheed Bhutto is seeded in a conspiracy between Pakistan’s ruling elite, internal reactionaries and international imperialist powers,” Rabbani had said.
