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June 12 , 2026
Defamation: Supreme Court Allows Imran to Contest ClaimIslamabad: The Supreme Court on Thursday restored former prime minister Imran Khan's right to defend himself in a long-running Rs10 billion defamation suit filed by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, setting aside lower court orders that had barred him from contesting the case in a majority verdict.
The apex court directed the trial court to provide Imran "reasonable opportunity" to file his reply to the interrogatories and proceed with the suit in accordance with law.
"By a majority of two-to-one (Muhammad Hashim Khan Kakar,J., dissenting) Civil Review Petition No.2-L of 2023 is allowed and the majority judgment dated 29.12.2022 is hereby set aside along with the judgments of the High Court and the Trial Court. The matter is remanded to the Trial Court with the direction to provide the Petitioner reasonable opportunity to file his reply to the interrogatories and proceed with the suit in accordance with law. Civil Review Petition No.1-L of 2023 is hereby dismissed", the top court order said.
A three-member bench of the Supreme Court, headed by Justice Ayesha Malik and comprising Justice Muhammad Hasham Kakar and Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim, heard a review petition filed by Imran against an earlier majority opinion that had closed his right of defense in the case. Justice Kakar had dissented from the majority verdict.
Shehbaz's defamation claim stems from Imran's 2017 allegations, which suggested that Shehbaz offered him Rs10 billion through a common friend in exchange for withdrawing from the Panama Papers case, which was then pending before the Supreme Court.
According to the suit, these "baseless and malicious" statements were widely circulated by the media, damaging Shehbaz's public image and causing "extreme mental torture, agony, and anxiety".
Shehbaz's legal team had asked the court to issue a decree for the recovery of Rs10 billion in compensation for the defamation, as well as for the harm caused by the statements. The prime minister contended that the accusations were false and led to significant reputational damage.
Justice Ibrahim, who authored the majority judgment, observed that the earlier verdict had erred in upholding the striking out of the petitioner's right of defense despite the absence of a formal application seeking such relief.
He noted that the decision was based merely on an unsubstantiated assumption that an oral request had been made. The judge held that these errors were apparent on the face of the record and warranted corrective intervention through the court's review jurisdiction.
"For a penal action as grave as the deprivation of the right of defense, such informal assumptions are legally insufficient; in my understanding, a formal, written, and documented application is a mandatory prerequisite, following the principle that the more serious the request, the more rigorous the procedural compliance must be." – The Express Tribune
Courtesy The Express Tribune
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