LAHORE, Feb 17: The canteen at the district and sessions courts stopped selling a particular brand of juice three days ago - - even though there have been denials that the lawyers in the city had imposed a ban on the soft drink.
Farooq, the canteen contactor, told Dawn he had stopped selling Shezan juice on, "high court’s orders".
"I’ve been told so by some lawyers here," he said when informed that no such orders had been passed by any judge.
A ban on the sale of Shezan products in lower courts of Lahore was demanded by a group of lawyers through a Lahore Bar Association’s resolution. The group had an issue with Shezan as they believed that some Ahmedis owned the company. A Shezan spokesman on Wednesday sought to dispel the impression. He said Shezan was a public limited company.
The bar officials say the resolution has to be approved by the general council of the LBA for the ban to hold. Effectively, it seems, the resolution has been enough of a deterrent for the drink to make a quick exit from the sessions court.
The group behind the motion goes by the title of Khatm-i-Nabuwwat Lawyers’ Forum (KNLF).
The sale of the brand of juice is, however, going on in the Aiwan-i-Adl, the courts that take up civil cases located a couple of hundreds of yards from the sessions courts where the criminal cases are heard.
The contractor of the canteen at the aiwan was not around. Lateef, an employee, told Dawn that no lawyer had asked them to stop providing Shezan juices at the eatery.
A couple of women lawyers present there, however, claimed that the drink would be banned soon at the canteen too.
Newspapers reported last week that the drink was banned by the lawyers for the company which produced Shezan had Ahmadis as its owners.
LBA President Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali says that no directions were issued to canteens of the lower courts to stop selling Shezan juices. He says one of numerous small groups of lawyers moved a resolution for a ban on the Shezan drink during the last LBA meeting.
The resolution, he insisted, had yet to be approved by the LBA general council to become effective.
