The Punjab Establishment of Special Courts (Overseas Pakistanis Property) Act, 2025, passed by the Provincial Assembly on 20 January last year, was designed as a targeted remedy for overseas Pakistanis whose property is often seized easily and recovered with difficulty. However, within months of the Special Courts becoming functional in November 2025, confusion arose over whether these courts were meant only for cases of admitted ownership and physical dispossession or for the broader spectrum of property disputes that overseas Pakistanis face.
Lahore High Court's Clarifying Judgment
The Lahore High Court's recent judgment in Muhammad Mudassar Iqbal v. Lake City Holdings (Pvt.) Ltd. and connected petitions has provided welcome clarity. The cases before the Court included a buyer seeking specific performance against a housing scheme, brothers seeking cancellation of a power of attorney executed by their late father, and heirs disputing a transfer letter issued on the strength of a hibanama. In each, the Special Court had declined jurisdiction, reasoning that the Act was meant only to 'secure and protect' existing ownership and possession, language drawn from its preamble. Litigants found themselves shuttled between Special Courts and Civil Courts in what the High Court later described as a 'ping-pong.'
Legal Reasoning
The High Court's reasoning reads the statute as a whole rather than in pieces. Section 3 of the Act speaks of Special Courts established to try 'petitions filed by overseas Pakistanis,' suggesting that an overseas Pakistani must be the plaintiff. Section 4(3), however, opens with a non-obstante clause and confers exclusive jurisdiction over 'all actions, disputes, petitions, suits, proceedings and matters connected therewith in which one or more of the parties are overseas Pakistanis.' The High Court treated Section 3 as merely organisational and enabling, while Section 4(3) is declaratory of substantive jurisdiction. This mirrors the Pakistani canon that beneficial legislation must receive a construction that advances the remedy rather than defeats it.
Refusal to Let Preamble Limit Scope
The Court also refused to let the preamble do the work of an operative provision. The preamble's reference to 'ownership and possession' was being used to restrict the statute. Preambles, as the Supreme Court has held, are keys to legislative intent, not locks upon it. The words 'matters connected therewith' and 'incidental thereto' in the preamble were not ornamental but jurisdictional doors deliberately left open.
Key Holdings
- The Court rejected any distinction between an overseas Pakistani as plaintiff and as defendant. The phrase 'one or more of the parties' in Section 4(3) removes any distinction between procedural postures. A litigant defending the validity of his own transaction is no less in need of protection than one initiating a claim.
- The Court extended the Section 13 transfer mandate to cases that ought to have been entertained by Special Courts but ended up elsewhere due to institutional confusion. Litigants cannot be prejudiced by the act of the Court itself, a principle long accepted in family courts context.
Critique of Legislative Draftsmanship
While the judgment is a careful piece of statutory rescue, it highlights deficiencies in legislative drafting. The Act is in its sixteenth month, and the Special Courts have been operational for barely six. In that brief span, the High Court has issued a fourteen-page reasoned judgment to clarify what the Act should have made obvious. This is an indictment of legislative draftsmanship: the preamble whispers 'ownership and possession' while Section 4(3) thunders 'all actions, disputes, petitions, suits, proceedings.' Section 3 is written as though only overseas Pakistani plaintiffs were envisaged. These are failures of drafting hygiene, not vision.
Broader Implications
This problem is not unique to Punjab. From the Anti-Terrorism Act to the Banking Companies Ordinance, from family courts to consumer courts, the judiciary has spent decades performing interpretive surgery on jurisdictional clauses that should never have required it. For the roughly nine million Pakistanis abroad, who remitted a record 38.3 billion US dollars home in fiscal year 2024-25, much of it invested in plots, files, and family land, Justice Anwaar Hussain's judgment is a relief. It restores a forum that was about to become a maze. The deeper task, however, belongs to those who write the laws. A statute should not need rescuing in its first year. The next overseas Pakistani who walks into a Special Court should not need a reported judgment in hand to be heard.
Ali Afzal Sahi, the writer, is a lawyer and Member of the National Assembly of Pakistan.
