Three Adiala prisoners move IHC to seek private treatment, citing PTI founder case

Ilyas Khan and the haemophilia diagnosis

The most medically acute of the three petitions belongs to Ilyas Khan, whose counsel told Justice Muhammad Asif that the prisoner suffers from haemophilia and has been taken to hospital ten times in the past two months without improvement. According to the petition summarised in court, the only facility capable of treating the condition is Shifa International Hospital, a private institution in Islamabad. The lawyer argued that under a Supreme Court judgment, prisoners may be shifted to private hospitals when the required treatment is not available at government facilities, and that the same ruling clarified the prisoner's family could bear the cost. The counsel's pointed question to the bench, whether a prisoner requiring a liver transplant should be denied treatment at a private hospital if no government facility can perform the procedure, frames the petition as a constitutional test of the right to health behind bars rather than a narrow medical grievance.

Shifa International Hospital and the medical board request

Shifa International Hospital appears across all three petitions as the preferred destination, signalling that the petitioners and their lawyers view it as the de facto benchmark for tertiary care in the federal capital. The counsel for Ilyas Khan asked the court to constitute a medical board to formally assess whether government hospitals can deliver the necessary treatment, a procedural step that would precede any transfer order. Awais Altaf's separate petition, alleging a fever and a heart condition, made the same Shifa-International request on the same legal theory, that access to adequate medical care is a fundamental right of prisoners. By concentrating the relief sought at a single private facility, the petitions implicitly pressure the IHC to make a finding on the adequacy of Adiala Jail's medical infrastructure rather than rule on individual symptoms.

Muhammad Ismail and nine years without Dubai contact

The third petition is qualitatively different. Muhammad Ismail has been incarcerated at Adiala Jail for nine years, and his counsel told the court that one of his brothers lives in Dubai and has been out of contact for years. Rather than seek a hospital transfer, the petition asks the IHC to direct jail authorities to facilitate communication between Ismail and his brother through WhatsApp. The relief sought is administrative rather than medical, and it folds into a broader pattern in Pakistani prison cases where inmates challenge restrictions on digital contact with overseas family members. By packaging a humanitarian communication request alongside two medical petitions in the same hearing, the counsel for the three prisoners signals that the underlying complaint is the wider operating environment of Adiala Jail, not the absence of any single specialist.

The IHC has issued notices to Adiala Jail authorities seeking parawise comments and adjourned the hearing until August 27, leaving the bench's eventual ruling as the next inflection point.