Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered the transfer of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan to a private hospital with a medical board including his sister and personal physician, plus weekly family visits, while maintainability of the petitions and a full independent medical record were still unresolved.

Critics argue the available medical evidence (moderate hypertension and improving eye condition) does not clearly establish an emergency justifying such personalized custodial arrangements, especially after family statements that he is “100 per cent fit.”

The core constitutional issue under Article 25 is equality before the law: whether extraordinary relief of this kind is a general standard available to all prisoners or amounts to judicial exceptionalism based on political prominence.

On Aug. 18, a three-judge bench of Pakistan’s Supreme Court, Justice Shahid Waheed, Justice Naeem Akhtar Afghan, and Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim, ordered the transfer of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan from Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi to Shifa International Hospital in Islamabad. The order formed a medical board that included Khan’s sister, cardiologist Dr. Uzma Khan, and his personal physician, Dr. Aasim Yusuf, directed weekly family visits, and specified Khan remain hospitalized until the next hearing, now scheduled for Sept. 16. The government has since filed a second review petition challenging the order, while Khan’s family and PTI have separately accused authorities of violating it.

The dispute is not, at bottom, a dispute about whether Prisoner 804 was taken to Shifa or to PIMS. It is a dispute about equality before law under Article 25 of Pakistan’s Constitution, and about whether one politically prominent prisoner is being afforded a judicial regime that remains unavailable, in practice, to thousands of other prisoners in Pakistan’s custody. Khan is entitled to adequate medical treatment, dignity, and every protection the Constitution affords. His........

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