ISLAMABAD, 9 December 2006 — The Supreme Court yesterday temporarily suspended a Lahore High Court decision ordering the return of a 12-year-old Scottish girl to Britain, a defense lawyer said.
The chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, issued the order following an appeal by the father of Molly Campbell, also known as Misbah Iram Ahmad Rana, who arrived in the eastern city of Lahore in August without permission from her Scottish mother.
Since then, the girl’s father and mother have been fighting a legal battle for her custody.
Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling came days after the Lahore High Court ordered that the girl be handed over to British authorities so she could be returned to her mother.
The girl’s father, Sajjad Ahmad Rana, had initially asked the appeals court in Lahore to overturn the ruling, but he withdrew that appeal on Thursday to approach the Supreme Court. In the brief order yesterday, the chief justice of the top court said he would again hear the case in the second week of January, and told authorities that the girl must not be taken outside the country until he had issued a final verdict.
The girl, who has been living in Lahore at her father’s home, was not present in the Supreme Court yesterday. Her father’s lawyer, Malik Mohammed Qayyum, told reporters that her presence was not required.
The case has drawn international attention since August, when Molly arrived in Lahore to live with her father and three siblings.
Her mother, Louise Campbell, has told Pakistani courts through her attorney that her daughter was taken to Pakistan illegally, although the girl herself has publicly said she wants to live in Pakistan with her father and siblings.
Police in Britain have said that Campbell is the girl’s legal guardian after she won her daughter’s custody in a British court last year.
On Thursday, Qayyum told the Associated Press that a foreign court has no jurisdiction over the custody of a child who is in Pakistan.
However, British and Pakistani judiciary officials in 2003 signed an agreement to return abducted children to the country where they normally lived, where a court would decide on which parent the child should live with.
In his petition Rana also challenged the protocol between Pakistan and Britain saying no law supported such a protocol.
