Sharif to Return from Exile

Dawn: "Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif Thursday ramped up his campaign to return to Pakistan to contest elections, arguing that President Pervez Musharraf had illegally sent him into exile. Sharif's lawyers were presenting arguments in a Supreme Court hearing. A lawyer for Sharif said his client had an "undeniable, unqualified, fundamental right to remain in Pakistan and contest the forthcoming elections."

"You have no right to send someone abroad, to send someone into exile," attorney Fakhruddin Ibrahim said in the first hearing on a petition filed by the former leader and his brother. Attorney General Malik Mohammed Qayyum said the government accepted that it could not prevent the Sharifs from returning but suggested they could face legal action on Pakistani soil. "Let them come and the law will take its own course," he said. He asked the court to dismiss the petition and not to interfere in an arrangement that involved another state, Saudi Arabia.

At one point, government lawyer Ibrahim Satti drew indignation from the judges for suggesting that Sharif's rights were still limited by a state of emergency declared back in 1998. Qayyum hastily asked for an adjournment and came back with a denial that any emergency powers were in force. "The country is not under any emergency and all the citizens have full, fundamental rights available to them under the constitution."