Kathmandu, Mar 16 (PTI) The deliberations on impeaching Nepal’s Chief Justice Cholendra Shumsher Rana was postponed until the Budget session of Parliament after the meeting of the House of Representatives was prorogued by the government on Wednesday.
Dev Gurung, a lawmaker from the CPN (Maoist Center), tabled the motion in the House of Representatives last week, amid obstruction from lawmakers of the main opposition CPN-UML.
According to officials at the Parliament Secretariat, the motion would be forwarded to the 11-member Impeachment Recommendation Committee formed on March 6 to study the allegations against Rana.
In the motion, the ruling party lawmakers have made 21 allegations of corruption and irregularities against 64-year-old Rana.
The deliberations will take place in the next session of the Parliament, senior advocate Dinesh Tripathi told PTI, adding the deliberations would not be affected by the conclusion of the House session.
With the 10th session of the House ending on Tuesday midnight, uncertainty looms as to when a decision on the impeachment motion, which was registered a month ago, will be taken.
As the budget session needs to begin at least a month prior to bringing the budget on May 29, as stipulated by the Constitution, the 11th session could start, most probably, by April 29. Therefore the motion will be delayed by at least one and a half months, The Kathmandu Post newspaper reported.
While tabling the impeachment motion, Speaker Agni Prasad Sapkota accused Rana of being incompetent and incapable of performing his role as the chief justice and that he couldn’t maintain transparency while fixing benches and finalising the cause list.
Federal Parliament Spokesperson Rojnath Pandey said the impeachment motion will remain as a property of the Parliament as the government had announced the same at the end of the federal parliament session.
Even after the end of the Parliament Session, the impeachment motion against Rana may be discussed in the upcoming Budget session, said Pandey.
To impeach Rana, a two-thirds of the members of the 271-strong lower house at present have to vote in favour. That means 181 lawmakers must vote in favour of the motion to impeach the Chief Justice.
As the ruling Nepali Congress (61 lawmakers), the Maoist Centre (49 lawmakers) and the Unified Socialist (23 lawmakers) together have 133 votes combined, support of an additional 48 lawmakers is a must.
The motion cannot be passed without the support of the CPN-UML, the single largest party in Parliament, which has 97 lawmakers, The Kathmandu Post reported. PTI SBP IND AKJ AKJ
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