Former chief justice Cholendra Shumsher Rana is currently at the Kathmandu Valley Crime Investigation Office of Nepal Police in Teku.
Police arrested Rana from his residence in Maharajgunj before dawn and are currently keeping him at the office.
However, Senior Superintendent of Police Santosh Khadka, chief of the office, said that Rana was not arrested but brought there for his protection.
SSP Khadka said that Rana was brought to the office at night after police received information that he could face a physical threat.
“We received information last night that there could be an activity aimed at physically harming him. He was then brought here for his security,” Khadka said.
Police had arrived at Rana’s Maharajgunj residence around midnight to take him into custody. He was brought to the police office at around 3 a.m.
SSP Khadka said that police could not disclose who posed the security threat to Rana.
“This cannot be explained publicly at the moment. In any case, we brought him here because we believed he would be safe here for the time being,” he said.
Asked why police brought Rana to the police office instead of providing security at his residence if he was facing a threat, Khadka said, “That is a valid argument.”
He reiterated that Rana had not been arrested.
“We were uncertain whether to keep him there or bring him here. We did not want to take the risk. That is why we brought him here under our protection,” he said.
Rana became chief justice in January 2019.
Three years later, he reportedly asked then-prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba to appoint “his person” to the Cabinet. At the time, Deuba appointed Rana’s brother-in-law as a minister. Following this, Supreme Court justices demanded Rana’s resignation and decided to boycott his benches and refuse to hear cases assigned by him.
The judges’ protest ended after the system of assigning cases through a lottery was introduced, effectively removing the chief justice’s authority to assign cases. Rana did not hear cases after the lottery system was implemented.
In February 2022, an impeachment motion was registered against him in Parliament, following which he was suspended.
The Parliamentary Impeachment Recommendation Committee conducted an investigation, including recording Rana’s statement and collecting evidence. The committee subsequently concluded that there were sufficient grounds to impeach him.
Parliament, however, did not reach a decision on the impeachment motion.
In November 2022, the secretary-general of the Federal Parliament wrote to the Supreme Court stating that the impeachment motion against Rana had become inactive. A writ petition was subsequently filed challenging the letter. The Supreme Court has since annulled the decision to dismiss the writ petition.
