ISLAMABAD: A top Pakistan court hearing the case of death row convict Kulbhushan Jadhav has asked India to cooperate in the legal proceeding over the matter, saying appearing before the court did not mean a waiver of sovereignty.
A three-member Bench of the Islamabad High Court (IHC), comprising Chief Justice Athar Minallah, Justice Aamer Farooq and Justice Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb, on Wednesday resumed hearing on the petition by Pakistan’s Ministry of Law and Justice seeking appointment of a lawyer for Jadhav.
Attorney General Khalid Jawed Khan told the Bench that to comply with the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Pakistan last year promulgated the law, CJ (Review and Reconsideration) Ordinance, 2020, to enable Jadhav to avail himself of the statutory remedy, a newspaper reported.
However, he argued, the Indian Government deliberately avoided joining court proceedings and was raising objections to a trial before a Pakistan court and had declined to even appoint a counsel for the IHC proceedings saying it “is tantamount to surrendering sovereign rights”. “It appears the Indian Government has objected not for non-implementation of the ICJ verdict but to engineer default on the basis of which it would try to justify going to the ICJ again,” he said.
The Chief Justice expressed surprise that the Indian High Commission in Islamabad was questioning the legitimacy of the court, the report said.