Four former chief justices (CJ) have went to the Supreme Court |(SC) on Monday and furnished written response in the contempt of court cases against them.
A single bench of Justice Manoj Kumar Sharma hearing different contempt of court cases against the four former CJs Min Bahadur Rayamajhi, Anup Raj Sharma, Kalyan Shrestha and Sushila Karki, Prime Minister (PM) KP Sharma Oli and former speaker Daman Nath Dhungana on January 28 had ordered them to appear before the court in the contempt of court cases related to their statements about the sub judice case of House dissolution.
They were been given seven days, excluding the time needed for transportation, to appear before the court but the court had not handed over the notice about the deadline.
CJs Rayamajhi, Shrestha and Karki handed over a joint response while Sharma submitted a separate written response on Monday.
"They had not issued the notice about deadline. We came on our own, accepted the deadline and returned after submitting the written response," Shrestha told Setopati.
The three CJs have argued that they merely exercised their fundamental rights including freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution as any other citizen and claimed any attempt to establish that public discussion on any sub judice case should be restricted is not acceptable from the perspective of freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution.
They have also pointed that no word or part of sentences in their statement take cognizance of the fact that any case about House of Representatives (HoR) is sub judice in the court, what the petitioner demand in the case, and does not prescribe if the court should treat those claims positively or negatively.
Advocates Lochan Bhattarai and Dhanjit Basnet had filed the contempt of court case against the former CJs on January 27.
The four former CJs had issued a statement a few weeks before that concluding that the House dissolution by Oli is unconstitutional.
The petitioners argued that the former CJs issued the statement in a way that influences the sub judice case amounting to contempt of the court.
