"There were three hearings in my case in which the federal government opposed my petition, but at the end the Honourable Lahore High Court ruled in my favour and ordered that I be supplied with the record of proceedings." [Bashir A. Khan]
Source/Credit: Bashir A. Khan, Esq.
By Bashir A. Khan | October 23, 2012
Ahmadiyya Times Editor's Note: The following account is published with permission from the author, Bashir A. Khan, Esq., Barrister and Solicitor, who reports a painstaking follow up which finally resulted in declassification of the anti-Ahmadiyya in-camera proceedings held in the Pakistan National Assembly in 1974. Among the struggles of Barrister Khan was an open letter he wrote in January 2010 to Dr. Fehmida Mirza, the Speaker of the National Assembly of Pakistan, which was published first in Pak Tea House blog and subsequently cross-posted at Ahamdiyya Times.
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Re: Record of proceedings of the Special Committee of the Whole House of the National Assembly of Pakistan (1974) which discussed and debated the Ahmadi Question and as a result the Second Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan was passed which declared Ahmadis as ‘Not Muslim’.
Dr. Fehmida Mirza, who is the Speaker of the National Assembly of Pakistan, has supplied me with the very first copy of these debates which I just received in January 2012. I have arranged for these debates to be saved on a CD as a PDF file. The debates consist of 21 separate sessions/volumes and are 3,083 pages long.
In summer of 2008, I undertook a self-directed project on my own to have the Government of Pakistan release a copy of these debates to me for my academic research. This project took up three and a half years of my life and cost me $13,800 dollars and thousands of hours of research into this topic.
To sum it up quite briefly, I wrote nearly 2,000 letters to the Members of the National Assembly and the Senate of Pakistan as well as to the Members of the Punjab Provincial Assembly. As this did not achieve the desired results, I then researched and drafted all of the legal arguments myself and then retained a lawyer in Lahore to sue the Secretary of the National Assembly of Pakistan (Mr. Karamat Hussain Niazi). A case was lodged in the Lahore High Court which was heard by Chief Justice Ijaz Ahmad Chaudhry, as he then was.
The lawyer that I hired in Pakistan simply presented my written arguments to the Lahore High Court as a petition. There were three hearings in my case in which the federal government opposed my petition, but at the end the Honourable Lahore High Court ruled in my favour and ordered that I be supplied with the record of proceedings.
Unfortunately, the federal government did not acknowledge this judgment and simply ignored my request to obtain a copy of these proceedings. I then instructed the lawyer in Pakistan to sue the Secretary of the National Assembly for Contempt of Court. In response to which I was notified that the Speaker of the National Assembly declassified the entire record and that I would be supplied with a copy of it.
This is the story of how the record of proceedings before you was obtained.
Thank you.
Yours Sincerely,
Bashir A. Khan
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