A five-member bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan will hear a petition filed by former Islamabad High Court judge Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui on December 14.

The bench will be led by Justice Qazi Faez Isa and will include Justice Amin-ud-Din Khan, Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhail, Justice Hassan Azhar Rizvi and Justice Irfan Saadat.

The judge had recently approached the SC for urgent fixing of his appeals.

Siddiqui’s appeal seeks to overturn a decision of the Supreme Judicial Council that removed him as a judge of the Islamabad High Court in 2018.

The SJC had received three different complaints about controversial remarks made by the judge in a speech to the Rawalpindi Bar.

Siddiqui had claimed that officials from the Islamabad High Court had pressured the IHC to keep Nawaz Sharif and his daughter, Maryam, behind bars while elections took place in the country.

He had also claimed that the ISI had told then IHC Chief Justice Muhammad Anwar Khan Kasi to refrain from including him on benches hearing Nawaz’s cases.

Siddiqui had been unable to provide proof for his claims and was removed by the SJC for ‘conduct unbecoming of a judge of a high court’.