Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Gulzar Ahmed on Wednesday said that the Islamabad High Court (IHC) decision on releasing the prisoners wasn’t according to the law, adding that the first thing was to review the jurisdiction of the high courts.

He remarked that someone in the Sindh High Court (SHC) too passed the orders like a king. Under which law the accused and the convicts could be released, the chief justice questioned.

When the attorney general argued that the court would be blamed in case of the coronavirus spread in prisons, the chief justice replied that they were not worried about any allegation.

He observed that how the criminals could be released at a time when the police were busy in the coronavirus emergency.

The chief justice said that the robberies had increased in Karachi after the bails granted by the SHC to the criminals, adding that the Defence area was in the control of robbers.

Judgment should be passed only after taking the ground realities into consideration, he noted.

Justice Qazi Amin, another member of the Supreme Court bench, remarked that there was a law to protect the prisoners, while Justice Sajjad Ali Shah noted that the affected persons should be kept in quarantine.

During the proceedings, the attorney general requested the apex court to give a uniform guidelines on the issue.

On this, Chief Justice Gulzar noted that several people were released on behalf of the chief justice. No one knows who has been released, he remarked and observed that the prison system should be shut down if such people were to be set free.

During the hearing, the Supreme Court was informed that 519 prisoners out of a total of 819 had so far been released on the SHC chief justice’s orders.

To this, Chief Justice sought the details of the crimes committed by those prisoners.