ISLAMABAD, June 11: The Supreme Court on Monday deferred its ruling on the maintainability of a petition filed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry against the presidential reference he faces, but commenced regular hearings on his plea.

Justice Khalilur Rehman Ramday, who heads the 13-member larger bench seized with the politically volatile case, announced that the question of maintainability of the petition, together with its merits, would be decided later and other identical petitions would be judged in the light of the outcome of the CJ’s case.

Outside the courtroom, lawyers construed the decision of initiating regular hearings on the merits of the CJ’s case as accepting the maintainability of Justice Chaudhry’s petition which also questions composition of the Supreme Judicial Council and its competence to inquire into his conduct.

The announcement to hear merits of the CJ’s petition came after eight advocates representing the federal government who, insisting from day one to be heard, exhausted their arguments within 20 minutes — a majority of them simply adopting the arguments already advanced by senior counsel Sharifuddin Pirzada in defending the presidential act of moving the reference against the chief justice. Although the day’s proceedings started 45 minutes late, the government side completed its arguments rather quickly.

“You wasted our two days only for this,” observed Justice Ramday against the backdrop of the fact that he wanted announcement on the petition maintainability on Friday but eventually put off the decision for Monday to let the government counsel complete their arguments.

The counsel who appeared before the bench one by one to represent the government were Chaudhry Naseer Ahmed, Shabbir Lalli, Mohammad Siddiq Mirza, Maqbool Ellahi Malik, Malik Abdus Sattar, Rana Abdul Hameed, Roy Mohammad Nawaz Kharral, Pervez Alamgir and Khaliq Mehmood.

Unexpected invitation to open arguments on merits of the case also came as a surprise for Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan, fighting the case of the CJ, as he conceded before the bench that he thought that the government’s counsel would consume the entire day in advancing their point of view.

He tried to establish that the reference against the chief justice had been prepared after he refused to resign during a meeting with President Gen Pervez Musharraf on March 9 at the president’s Rawalpindi camp office.

The reference, Barrister Ahsan alleged, had been moved with mala fide intent, contained certain flaws and seemed to have been filed without application of mind.

The CJ being the highest judicial office decided 6,000 cases of human rights abuses in one calendar year alone and in some of his interventions he had invited the ire of respondents, including the president. Barrister Ahsan also explained that his challenge to the reference would focus around attacking the president’s decision of moving the reference without forming his opinion which, therefore, was an illegal act.

He said the arguments would also question the restraining of a judge of the superior court by the executive or by the council, even by the Supreme Court, and sending him on forced leave without completing procedure laid down in Article 209 of the Constitution, adding that the provision itself put safeguards against such removal from office.

Barrister Ahsan said he would also challenge the validity of the notification for appointment of the acting chief justice on the same day, convening of the SJC meeting, restraining order against the CJ by the SJC and veracity of the orders issued to send the chief justice on forced leave.