ISLAMABAD, Dec 29: The Supreme Court is expected to announce on Friday whether to admit or reject requests by PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif and others to order a judicial inquiry into the so-called memorandum scandal.

Petitioners Barrister Zafarullah of the Watan Party and Advocate Tariq Asad concluded on Thursday their rebuttals to arguments advanced by Asma Jehangir, the counsel for former ambassador Husain Haqqani. Advocate Rasheed A. Razvi will present his arguments on Friday in favour of acceptance of the petitions, after which the court is likely to speak out its mind.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry said no-one, neither the prime minister, nor army chief and the ISI director general and not even Mr Haqqani, had denied the existence of the memorandum; rather they demanded a proper investigation.

He said many things about the memo had been admitted.

Ms Jehangir said the memo was just a piece of paper and nobody except Pakistani-American Businessman Mansoor Ijaz had ever linked Mr Haqqani with it. It was written by an American and delivered to another American.

Reading out the memo, the counsel pointed out that national security as mentioned in the document was an American concept that did not exist in Pakistan.

Going through the BlackBerry messages, one finds that it was Mr Ijaz who was continuously messaging Mr Haqqani which shows the keenness of a man who boasted to have connections with almost two dozen intelligence agencies of the world. “Is his credibility above that of our own ambassador?” she asked.

But the court asked her to ignore the replies of foreign individuals and stick to the affidavit of the army chief who had accepted the memo’s existence, referring to him (the army chief) as a man who was protecting the frontiers and shedding blood. Ms Jehangir said blood was shed by soldiers and the army chief had said the force was in high spirits and fully capable of defending the country.

“Now from where did the tangible threat come,” she asked, and said the affidavit of the army chief was reasonable in which he had assured the nation that there was no threat to the integrity of the country.

“The entire Pakistan is proud of the army,” she said in her usual style, but at the same time questioned the role of the chief of Inter-Services Intelligence and asked why he had gone to interview Mr Ijaz after reading an article in a foreign newspaper, that too without informing the prime minister.

“Had he gone with a preconceived notion that all civilians were not loyal to the state,” the counsel asked. She said Mr Haqqani had shaken heaven and earth to protect the name of Pakistan as ambassador to the United States but what had he got in return.

“He had to resign after much hype against him because this is a weak government in a phase of transition and cannot stand against the army,” the counsel argued.

“The man has been crushed between the two institutions,” she said and regretted that the court had put a restriction on her client’s movement without taking into consideration the question of his livelihood.

At this the court said it had passed an innocent order on Dec 1, but the counsel emphasised that it could not speak with double messaging.

If the petitioners had any grievance against Mr Haqqani, she argued, then there were other forums available because the controversy related to a political issue against the backdrop of tensions in the civil-military relationship.

“Haqqani will not resist any probe but it should be in accordance with the law,” she said.

She said an inquiry commission could be appointed under the Commissions of Inquiry Act of 1956, like the one appointed after the Abbottabad incident, or a criminal case could be lodged on charges of waging a war.

Ms Jehangir said the Parliamentary Committee on National Security had every right to launch an investigation.

“Violation of fundamental rights based on far-fetched apprehensions does not merit the question of maintainability,” she said.

The counsel said the petitioners would have to establish actual violation of fundamental rights for the enforcement of which they had come to the court.

She said that by any stretch of imagination the petitioners had not identified how the right to life had been affected through a “spurious paper”, but on the contrary the right of her client had been affected as due process had been denied to him.