The Supreme Court (SC) did not have time on Thursday to hear the writ petitions registered against CPN (Maoist Center) Chairman and Prime Minister (PM) Pushpa Kamal Dahal.
The single bench of Justice Bishwambhar Shrestha was scheduled to hear the writ petitions and the case was listed as the fourth to be heard by the bench of Shrestha on Thursday. But the bench could not hear it in lack of time, according to the SC website.
The petition by 14 including advocates Gyanendra Aran and Kalyan Budhathoki, and another by Chiranjeevi Giri were registered on Tuesday.
Aran and Budhathoki had approached the Supreme Court with separate petitions in November 2022 seeking an order to arrest Dahal and take necessary action against him in connection with conflict-era cases. But the court administration refused to register their petitions stating that conflict-era cases are outside the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court as they would be addressed by the transitional justice mechanism.
Aran and Budhathoki had then appealed against the court administration’s decision.
Hearing their appeal on Friday, a bench of justices Ishwar Khatiwada and Hari Krishna Phuyal had ordered the court administration to register the writ petitions brought by Aran and Budhathoki against Dahal.
Addressing an event organized at Khula Manch in Kathmandu on the occasion of Maghi on January 15, 2020, Dahal had refuted allegations that he had killed 17,000 people during the decade-long Maoist armed conflict but said that he would take responsibility for the deaths of 5,000 of those killed during that period. He had also said that he would take responsibility for all the good and bad things that happened during the armed conflict.
The petition registered on Tuesday seeks an order to arrest Dahal on the basis of the statement he had made then.
The election for vice-president is scheduled to be held on March 17.
