🇵🇰 Pakistan's Supreme Court ordered Imran Khan moved to hospital. He was back in his cell within hours, and the whole episode captures exactly how his three years in custody have gone.
The backstory: Khan, 73, has been jailed since August 2023 on corruption convictions he and his party call politically motivated.
Concerns have built for months over his health, fluctuating blood pressure, anxiety the jail's own cardiac board linked to restricted family contact, and reported vision loss in one eye that first surfaced back in February.
Last week the Supreme Court ordered him transferred to Shifa International Hospital within 48 hours for an independent medical board assessment, with family access and calls to his sons abroad.
The government fought the order and even tried a review petition. When the transfer finally happened, Khan was diverted to a different, state-run hospital, PIMS, over what officials called a "security situation."
A six-doctor team, including a cardiologist and ophthalmologist, examined him overnight and declared him fit to remain in custody. By 5am he was back in Adiala jail.
@PTIofficial calls the whole sequence a violation of the court's order.
What makes this more than a routine prison-health story: Khan was Pakistan's elected prime minister until a 2022 no-confidence vote, and his imprisonment has become the central fault line in a country where the military has historically held the real levers of power.
Courts have sided with him on paper repeatedly, this is now at least the third medical order in a year, while the practical outcome each time is identical: examined, cleared, returned to the same cell.
The pattern itself, a former PM's health becoming a recurring legal battle rather than a settled fact, says something about how contested power actually is in Pakistan right now.
Source: The Telegraph / Writer: Oliver
قاسم خان انٹرنیشنل میڈیا پر 🚨
اس وقت میں زیادہ پریشان ہوں کیونکہ آخری بار جب ہماری اپنے والد سے بات ہوئی تھی تو وہ اپنی آنکھ کے علاج اور دیگر قیدیوں کے ساتھ ہونے والے سلوک پر پریشان تھے۔
جیل میں حالات انتہائی خوفناک ہے، ہیپاٹائٹس کی وجہ سے جیل میں کئی اموات ہو چکی ہیں
Jemima Goldsmith, Imran Khan's former wife, has called on the British government to intervene over the former prime minister’s treatment in Pakistan, urging it to uphold his fundamental rights in accordance with directives issued by the Supreme Court of Pakistan.
For more: https://t.co/OViTfzreAh
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An army officer beats up the students & then got beaten up by the students in a university in Pakistan - Pakistan army is behaving as if they are all powerful & above everyone & Pakistan’s GenZ is angry & can explode anytime against Munir dictatorship!
Prime Minister @andyburnham and Foreign Secretary @Ed_Miliband : how much longer will Britain remain silent?
For three years the father of my two sons, and Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, has been brutally penalised by his political opponents, in a personal vendetta by Army Chief, Asim Munir, which according to the UN, amounts to torture and which is now taking a potentially fatal toll on his physical and mental health.
He has endured 3 years of solitary confinement. For nearly ten months now his family has been denied contact with him. He has been deprived of the most basic human contact, denied access to books, lawyers and doctors.
The international human-rights standards are unequivocal. Under the UN’s Nelson Mandela Rules, solitary confinement lasting more than 15 consecutive days is prohibited and amounts to torture.
He has endured this treatment not for 15 days, but for three years.
Pakistan’s own Supreme Court has now intervened: ordering comprehensive medical treatment, access to his personal doctor, regular family visits and twice-weekly calls with his sons.
Yet those orders are being defied.
This is no longer simply a Pakistani political matter. It is a human-rights emergency.
He has deep and lifelong ties to Britain. He studied at Oxford University, captained Oxford University cricket and spent years playing county cricket in England. His relationship with this country stretches back more than half a century. His charitable activities were internationally recognised, and include building the only free cancer hospital in Pakistan as well as a university.
His sons, my two boys, Sulaiman and Kasim, are British citizens. They have been forced to watch their father’s health decline from thousands of miles away, prevented from visiting him, denied visas, publicly threatened by government officials with arrest themselves, and even denied court-mandated regular phone calls.
I have repeatedly appealed to the UK government to intervene. Purported attempts at back channelling have evidently failed. The previous Foreign Secretary @DavidLammy informed me in writing that Britain would not intervene if my sons, British citizens, are arrested when they travel to Pakistan to visit their father.
@FCDOGovUK: Britain must now speak out publicly and unequivocally. Demand that Pakistan comply with its own Supreme Court; restore Imran Khan’s medical access, his right to see his family, end his prolonged isolation and uphold his fundamental human rights.
Pakistan is a Commonwealth country. Britain has a long and proud tradition of standing against arbitrary detention, inhumane treatment and the denial of fundamental rights. Those principles mean very little if we invoke them only selectively and neglect them when inconvenient.
This an appeal to the new Burnham government to please now do the right thing.