ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court on Wednesday set aside the Sindh High Court’s (SHC) Oct 27 interim order in which it had recalled licences of around 124 wine shops in the province.

Allowing the appeal, a three-judge SC bench, headed by Justice Mian Saqib Nisar, remanded the case back to the high court to decide the matter after hearing out the aggrieved party whose wine shops had been closed down after the order. The apex court, however, made it clear that Wednesday’s order did not mean that sale of liquor would be allowed in Sindh.

Lawyers Asma Jahangir and Shahid Hamid, representing various wine shops of Sindh, appeared before the court on Wednesday.

The bench noted a common objection on the part of the petitioners who had claimed that the high court had neither attended to the points raised by them nor provided them a proper hearing.

It appeared as if, the court observed, the high court had gone beyond the scope of the petition and had decided the matter on an interim order by invoking suo motu jurisdiction.

Shahid Hamid, representing the Associate Wine Merchants of Karachi, argued that the high court had granted relief which had not been asked for and recalled that the Supreme Court, in an earlier judgement, had held that no final relief could be issued at an interim stage.

In her petition, Asma Jahangir said that the high court had on Oct 18 ordered the relevant authority to start recalling licences given to liquor shops. The order had come with the observation that there was no provision under Article 17 that created a legal authority for granting general licences to liquor shops to operate throughout the year, as only non-Muslims could buy and sell liquor for consumption at religious ceremonies, for which a request had to be made in advance.

In their appeal, the representatives of liquor shops argued that the high court had arbitrarily concluded that liquor was being sold in violation of Article 17 of the Prohibition (Enforcement of Hadd) Order 1979, without examining sale records of wine shops, even though there had not been a single complaint against the petitioners.

The petitioners said the excise department had no records with regard to religious festivals of non-Muslims where consumption of alcohol was permissible. Moreover, the high court had not sought the views of all religious minorities in Sindh, including the Parsi community, they argued.

The petitioners argued that liquor distilleries and stores were operative all over the country, including the Islamabad Capital Territory, Balochistan and Punjab.

The livelihood of thousands of shopkeepers and their families was at stake as a result of the high court’s order, the petition regretted, adding that over 24,000 citizens worked in the alcohol retail business in Sindh alone.

They faced loss of livelihood and grave and irreparable financial damage as a consequence of the order, the petition said, adding that show-cause notices had been issued to them without affording them the opportunity to be heard or to make an alternative business plan.

Published in Dawn November 24th, 2016