Iran Press/ Asia: Imran Khan lost his parliamentary majority last week and had faced a no-confidence vote tabled by the opposition that he was expected to lose on Sunday.
But the deputy speaker of parliament, a member of Khan’s party, threw out the motion, ruling it was part of a foreign conspiracy and unconstitutional.
The stand-off has thrown the country of 220 million people into a full-blown constitutional crisis.
The opposition has challenged the decision to block the vote in the Supreme Court.
On Wednesday, lawyers for Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party launched their defense.
Ali Zafar, a lawyer for President Arif Alvi, who is a party ally of Khan, said the court should not involve itself in parliamentary procedure.
The Supreme Court will reconvene around 9:30 am on Thursday. Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial said he wanted to wrap up the hearings on Wednesday.
The court could order parliament to be reconstituted, call for fresh elections, or bar Khan from power if he is found to have violated the constitution.
It could also decide if it cannot intervene in parliamentary affairs.
Pakistan’s military is facing growing calls from the opposition to weigh in on the legitimacy of Khan’s complaints about a foreign plot against him, which he said was being orchestrated by the United States.
Khan, like many Pakistanis, criticized the 20-year-long US intervention in neighboring Afghanistan, which came to an end in August last year with the withdrawal of US-led foreign forces and the return of the Islamist Taliban to power.
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