Reporting snapshot · 5 November 2026. The order is interim: the court suspended the challenged high court orders, issued notices and adjourned the case, so it settles a jurisdictional question for now and nothing more. The order itself has not been published, and the accounts of the hearing come from two outlets reporting the same bench's directions, so the precise terms and the number of affected cases are not yet settled.
What happened
On Thursday, 5 November, the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) restrained the Peshawar High Court (PHC) from hearing cases arising from arrests under Section 3 of the Maintenance of Public Order (MPO) Ordinance in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Geo News reported. The same court suspended the Peshawar High Court orders that were under challenge, The Express Tribune reported, and adjourned further proceedings indefinitely.
A two-member bench headed by Chief Justice Aminuddin Khan heard a petition filed by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government against several orders passed by different benches of the Peshawar High Court, both outlets said. The K-P government approached the court after the high court issued interim orders restraining authorities from making arrests under 3-MPO and directed the release of 28 Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) workers detained in districts of the province, Geo News said.
The case before the constitutional court also involves Sohail Afridi, the non-functional Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister, and others, and had been pending in the Peshawar High Court, The Express Tribune said.
What the order does
Three things follow from what the bench said on Thursday. The high court is restrained from hearing MPO detention cases of the kind that were before it. The challenged orders of the high court are suspended while the case is pending. And the case itself is adjourned indefinitely, with notices issued to the parties, so the objections come first and no hearing date has been fixed.
Chief Justice Aminuddin Khan told the parties’ counsel to read the order before filing objections, saying they could file their objections after examining it, The Express Tribune said. The court has therefore not decided whether arrests under Section 3 of the MPO Ordinance are lawful in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, or whether the high court had jurisdiction to restrain them. It has decided, for now, that the high court cannot go on.
The order is also an assertion of authority over the high court. KhabarWire reported on 2 November that the FCC has ruled that judgments of the Supreme Court are not binding on it, while carrying persuasive value. That judgment concerned the relationship between the two apex courts. This order runs the other way, from the constitutional court down to a provincial high court, and rests on a provision the court treated as decisive in a separate case in October, when it held that its rulings on questions of law bind all courts, including the Supreme Court, The Express Tribune reported.
The arguments at the hearing
The province’s advocate general argued that the high court could not interfere in areas where the military was conducting operations under Article 245 of the Constitution, and that it could not exercise its writ jurisdiction under Article 199 in such circumstances, both outlets reported. Justice Aamer Farooq, sitting on the bench, asked whether the high court would not hear the cases that come before it every day, noting that several petitions under Article 199 are filed there daily, The Express Tribune said.
Shah Faisal Ilyas, a former additional advocate general, appeared for the respondents. He asked the court to hear the parties before issuing an interim injunction and argued that the provincial government’s three objections could not be sustained, both outlets reported.
The case reaches the constitutional court from a province under emergency and governor’s rule. The federal government proclaimed emergency rule and governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on 11 October, and Parliament ratified the measures in a joint sitting days later. A separate petition asking the FCC to declare the emergency and governor’s rule unconstitutional was filed on 20 October, the day the Peshawar High Court set a 10 November hearing on petitions against the same measures, as KhabarWire reported on 21 October. KhabarWire follows that file in its Khyber Pakhtunkhwa emergency hub.
What it means for detained workers
Section 3 of the MPO Ordinance allows a provincial government or a deputy commissioner to order preventive detention without a warrant, and it was the provision used to detain Aleema Khan, the sister of the jailed former prime minister Imran Khan, in Lahore for 30 days in September, as KhabarWire reported.
The orders now suspended in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa included a direction to release 28 detained PTI workers. The reading that follows from the order, though it is not stated expressly, is that while the suspension lasts the high court cannot grant the detainees further relief and its release direction cannot be acted upon. For people held under Section 3 without a charge, the practical consequence of today’s order is that the fastest route to release through the high court is closed for the time being, and their cases now wait on a constitutional court that has not set a date.
What is still uncertain
The order is not published. Its terms are known here from two outlets reporting the same hearing, and neither account sets out how many orders are suspended, which cases they cover, or whether the high court may still take up MPO matters that were not part of the challenge.
The file is at an early stage. Objections were invited and notices issued, and the case was adjourned indefinitely, so no date is fixed and no reasoned order has been explained beyond the directions reported on Thursday. The provincial government has not said publicly whether it will press its three objections, and the respondents have not said whether they will seek a stay of the constitutional court’s own order.
Two further questions are open. The relationship between the two courts has moved in two directions in three weeks, with the FCC holding in October that its rulings bind all courts and in November that Supreme Court judgments do not bind it, and it is not settled which account governs when the two courts’ business overlaps. And the Peshawar High Court’s own 10 November listing on petitions against the emergency is not addressed in the accounts of Thursday’s order; whether it survives is not stated.
The detention figures in this case are also contested. The 28 workers named in the high court’s order are the number reported by Geo News; the federal government has published no detainee count of its own for these arrests.
