PTI Urges Supreme Court to Enforce Hospital Order for Imran Khan as Health Fears Mount

PTI Asks Court to Act as Health Row Deepens

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has asked the Supreme Court to enforce its own order moving jailed former prime minister Imran Khan to hospital, after the party’s chairman said the latest reports about Khan’s health in prison were “not encouraging”. The application, filed on Friday, asks the court to fix an early hearing on the implementation of an order first made on 18 August, which directed that Khan be transferred to Shifa International Hospital in Islamabad and examined by a medical board. According to the Express Tribune, the application was filed by PTI Senator Mashal Yousafzai, who said the case had not been listed for hearing even though weeks had passed since the court last took it up.

Speaking to reporters outside Parliament House in Islamabad on Friday, PTI Chairman Barrister Gohar Ali Khan said the party had received instructions about Khan’s health and his legal cases after a meeting with him, and that there should be no compromise on his medical treatment. “The reports concerning the PTI founder’s health are not encouraging, and the entire nation is worried,” Gohar said, according to the Islamabad Post. He said the party wanted the Supreme Court’s 18 August decision implemented and had asked the court to schedule the matter for an early hearing. “Decisions should be taken regarding the PTI founder’s transfer to hospital and medical treatment,” he added.

The filing turns a long-running dispute over Khan’s medical care into a direct question for the Supreme Court: whether its own directions, issued nearly three months ago, have been carried out. The party says they have not. The government, for its part, has said it will comply with the court’s orders while maintaining that Khan has been examined and found to be in good health. What neither side has produced is an independent, published medical account of Khan’s current condition — and that absence sits at the centre of everything that follows.

The Claim at the Centre of the Row

The urgency in the PTI’s filing rests on a single, alarming claim: that Khan’s blood pressure suddenly rose to 192. The figure comes from Khan’s family. According to The News, his sister Rubina Khan said in a statement shared by his son Kasim Khan that the former prime minister had conveyed that his blood pressure had suddenly risen to 192, raising concerns about his safety in prison. Kasim Khan also warned about the consequences of his father’s prolonged isolation. Other reporting, citing sources, put the figure at around 190. The party has demanded that Khan be admitted immediately to an independent medical facility in the presence of his personal doctor.

That reading has not been independently verified. No independent medical report has been published alongside the claim, and the government has not published its own medical account of the reported episode. The dispute over the figure is, unusually, not only between the party and the government. It comes from inside the very meeting on which the claim is said to rest.

Khan’s lawyer Salman Safdar met him at Adiala Jail on 2 November — the first such meeting in seven months, according to Safdar — and also met Khan’s wife, Bushra Bibi, after eleven months. Safdar has since distanced himself from the circulating health reports, saying he was not the source of the information about the former prime minister’s health and that his responsibilities were strictly legal. “He was not acting as anyone’s messenger,” the Islamabad Post reported. According to senior analyst Muneeb Farooq, speaking on a Geo News programme on Saturday, Safdar told him not to believe the reports about Khan’s blood pressure. Farooq said Safdar had given no indication that Khan was seriously ill, that his blood pressure was unstable, or that he needed to be shifted to hospital immediately, and that no such report had emerged from the meeting.

The result is a public argument built on a claim whose own provenance is contested. The party and the family say the reading came from Khan himself. The lawyer who sat with him says he is not the source of the reports and has warned against believing them. The government has offered no medical evidence of its own. For readers, the honest position is the one the reporting supports: a serious claim has been made by the family and the party, it has not been independently verified, and the only lawyer known to have met Khan recently has declined to stand behind it.

What the Supreme Court Ordered on 18 August

The order the PTI now wants enforced was made by a three-member bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice Shahid Waheed, with Justice Naeem Akhtar Afghan and Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim, on 18 August 2026. According to Dawn’s reporting of the order, the court directed that Khan be transferred to Shifa International Hospital in Islamabad within two days for medical examination and treatment. It directed the formation of a medical board comprising a physician, a general surgeon, an internal medicine specialist, an ophthalmologist and a cardiologist, and it permitted Khan’s personal physician, Dr Faisal Sultan, and his sister Dr Uzma Khan to take part in his medical examination and treatment. The court also directed the authorities to provide Khan’s complete medical record to the court and to facilitate regular meetings between Khan and members of his family. The court described the directions as interim measures, with questions about the maintainability of the petitions to be considered later.

The order was significant for a reason that went beyond one prisoner. In its interim order, the court stated that imprisonment does not remove a prisoner’s entitlement to humane treatment and necessary medical care, and it required the government to provide medical records and information about Khan’s treatment to the court. The proceedings raised questions about the extent to which an individual prisoner may receive treatment at a private medical institution, the role of personal physicians in a prisoner’s care, and how such arrangements sit within prison administration.

The government challenged the order the next day. Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar said the government preferred treatment through a government hospital while allowing specialists to take part, and on 19 August the government filed a review application arguing that directing a transfer to a private hospital raised legal and procedural issues and was discriminatory. According to Dawn, the Supreme Court subsequently returned the government’s review plea for procedural reasons.

On 20 August, Khan was taken from Adiala Jail for a medical examination — but not to Shifa International Hospital. According to Reuters, he was initially expected to be taken to Shifa, but security considerations affected the arrangements, and he was examined at the state-run Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) instead. He was returned to prison the same day. The medical team that examined him included specialists in ophthalmology and cardiology and reported that he was medically fit at the time of the examination, according to the Associated Press. PIMS later said specialists from Shifa International Hospital had taken part in the examination of Khan’s eyes, while PIMS specialists conducted the other assessments. The PTI objected to the return to prison, arguing that the court’s order had contemplated continued medical supervision, and the party’s lawyers, Salman Akram Raja and Uzair Bhandari, later filed a contempt petition against the government over the transfer to PIMS instead of Shifa.

The Case Then Stalled

When the Supreme Court resumed hearing the matter on 16 September, the case took a different turn. The bench raised questions about an order of the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) summoning the record of the proceedings, and about the FCC’s jurisdiction to do so. Attorney General Mansoor Awan sought three weeks to examine the questions and to assist the court, and the court granted the request. The hearing was adjourned for three weeks.

According to Yousafzai’s application, those three weeks expired without the case being fixed for further hearing. Neither the Supreme Court nor the FCC had listed the case, the Express Tribune reported. Yousafzai, one of the petitioners who had asked the court to order Khan’s move from Adiala Jail to Shifa International Hospital, said in her application that Khan remained in solitary confinement with severely restricted access to his family and lawyers. “His health is deteriorating, and the failure to provide the medical care and facilities already directed by this Honourable Court has given rise to serious concerns regarding his physical and mental well-being,” she wrote, according to the Express Tribune. “In these circumstances, any further delay may have serious consequences for his health.”

The application also recalled that the court had questioned the implementation of the remaining directions in the 18 August order. During the September hearing, Justice Waheed asked why there was an issue with providing Khan’s complete medical record, saying the material provided so far was only a summary of the medical report. He directed that the complete record be submitted to the court before the next hearing. Justice Naeem Akhtar Afghan asked about a reference to angiography in the medical report and whether such a procedure could be performed in jail. The court also sought from Adiala Jail authorities the record of meetings held with Khan during the past three years and asked why an Islamabad High Court order on family meetings had been violated.

The government has maintained that it will follow the court’s directions. Federal Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Dr Tariq Fazal Chaudhry told the Senate on Tuesday that the government would implement the Supreme Court’s order regarding Khan’s health “in letter and spirit”, and that neither the prime minister nor the government had the authority to overturn or alter court decisions. Government representatives have also said Khan is in good health following the examination. The tension between that assurance and the party’s alarm is precisely what the court is now being asked to resolve — by fixing a date and deciding whether its order has been complied with.

Gohar’s Wider Demands

Gohar used Friday’s appearance to make demands that went beyond the hospital question. He called for an end to political tensions, saying the situation should not be allowed to escalate further, and demanded an end to the detention of lawmakers, party workers and supporters. “The practice of picking up members of the assemblies, party workers and supporters should stop,” he said, according to the Daily Times. He said legal teams were preparing separate bail petitions for political detainees.

He also demanded the immediate release of Khan’s detained sisters, saying the party had yet to receive information about their condition. The sisters’ detention has already drawn judicial attention: the Lahore High Court has summoned the deputy commissioner over the matter and ordered a family meeting. Gohar said the party wanted implementation of the Supreme Court’s 18 August decision and an end to the arrests and detention of political leaders and workers.

The demands land in a political atmosphere that has been tense for weeks. On 4 November, opposition parties meeting at the Islamabad residence of Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman agreed to strengthen their alliance, coordinate in parliament and hold an all-parties conference within ten days. At that meeting, PTI Secretary General Salman Akram Raja raised concerns about Khan’s health, saying his blood pressure was not under control, according to Dawn. The parties formed committees to settle their differences and organise the conference, which is expected to take up the health question alongside the emergency rule imposed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Khan himself, according to Gohar, did not welcome the end of the PTI government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where emergency rule and governor’s rule were imposed on 11 October and the chief minister, Sohail Afridi, was taken into preventive custody. Gohar described the 2 November meeting as his first with Khan in 380 days. That meeting — the first in more than a year between the party chairman and its founder — is the same encounter that produced both the instructions Gohar says he received about Khan’s health and the dispute over the blood-pressure claim.

The Man at the Centre

Khan, 73, served as Pakistan’s prime minister from 2018 to 2022 and has been held in Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi since his arrest in August 2023, following convictions in several criminal cases. His party has described a number of those cases as politically motivated; the authorities have maintained that the legal proceedings are conducted under the law. He remains the central figure in Pakistani opposition politics despite more than three years in prison, and his health has repeatedly become a political question in its own right — most recently when his sister, herself a doctor, checked his blood pressure in August and said he was “completely healthy and fit” at 120/80, a reading that now sits uneasily beside the family’s latest claim.

The Islamabad High Court has fixed 10 November for the appeals of Khan and Bushra Bibi in the £190 million case, one of the cases that continues to define his legal position. The timing matters: the hospital-transfer question, the appeals, the detention of his sisters and the emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are all moving through the courts at once, and each feeds the other politically.

For the PTI, the health question is also a test of whether court orders in Khan’s favour are carried out. The party’s argument is straightforward: the Supreme Court ordered a transfer to a named hospital and a medical board; the government took him to a different hospital, returned him to prison the same day, and then let the case drift for weeks while the court’s own questions about jurisdiction went unanswered. For the government, the answer is equally straightforward: Khan was examined by specialists, found fit, and the state’s obligation was discharged. The court has not yet ruled between those two accounts, and until it fixes the case for hearing, it cannot.

Analysis: Why It Matters

A court order, not a medical debate

The most important thing about this story is what it is not. It is not, at this stage, a medical debate, because there is no medical evidence in the public domain on which a debate could be held. No independent medical report has been published. The family’s claim of a blood-pressure reading of 192 has not been verified by any doctor, hospital or court. The government’s assurance that Khan is in good health rests on an examination in August whose full report the Supreme Court itself has asked to see. What the case actually turns on is narrower and more consequential: whether a direction of the Supreme Court, made in August, has been implemented. That is a question of compliance, and it is one the court is well placed to answer — if it hears the case.

The credibility gap cuts both ways

Both sides in this dispute have a credibility problem, and both problems matter. The PTI’s alarm is undermined by its own lawyer’s refusal to stand behind the central claim: Salman Safdar, the one person who sat with Khan on 2 November, has said he was not the source of the health reports and has warned against believing them. A party that asks the public to trust an unverified medical claim while its own counsel distances himself from it invites scepticism, however genuine its concern may be. The government, meanwhile, asks the public to trust an assurance of good health while withholding the medical record the court ordered it to produce, and while the full report of the August examination remains unseen. Neither side has given the public a reason to be certain, and the gap between their accounts is filled, inevitably, by speculation.

The constitutional court question is the real legal hinge

The reason this case has stalled is not medical but institutional. The Supreme Court’s September hearing was consumed by a question about the Federal Constitutional Court: whether the new constitutional court could summon the record of the hospital-transfer proceedings, and whether the Supreme Court’s own jurisdiction was affected. The Attorney General was given three weeks to assist the court on that question, and the case has not been listed since. That is a dispute about the architecture of Pakistan’s judiciary — created by the 27th Amendment, which established the constitutional court — and it now determines whether a prisoner’s medical case is heard at all. The PTI’s application asks the court to cut through that tangle and fix a date. How the court answers will say something about how the new judicial structure works in practice, not just in theory.

Health as political currency

Khan’s health has become political currency in a way that helps no one, least of all Khan. For the PTI, every report of a deterioration is a mobilising tool: it rallies supporters, pressures the government and gives the opposition’s all-parties conference a human cause. For the government, every assurance of good health is a way of closing the subject down. The danger is that the medical question becomes entirely instrumental — a claim to be deployed rather than a condition to be treated. The history of this case supports that concern: in August, Khan’s own sister, a doctor, said he was “completely healthy and fit” after checking his blood pressure herself; three months later, the family says the same reading has spiked to 192. One of those accounts may be wrong, or both may reflect different moments. Without a medical board’s findings, the public cannot know, and the political uses of the claim will continue to outpace the evidence for it.

What the next hearing will decide

The immediate question is procedural: will the Supreme Court fix the case for hearing next week, as Yousafzai’s application requests, and will it decide whether its 18 August order was complied with? If it does, the court will have to confront the PIMS transfer directly — whether taking Khan to a state hospital instead of Shifa, and returning him to prison the same day, satisfied an order that specified Shifa and a medical board. It will also have to decide whether the complete medical record, which it asked for in September, must finally be produced. Those are decisions with consequences beyond Khan: they will define what compliance with a Supreme Court medical order looks like, and whether a prisoner’s right to treatment ordered by a court can be satisfied by a brief examination at a different hospital. The contempt petition already filed by the PTI sharpens the point — it asks the court to treat the PIMS transfer not as a good-faith alternative but as a violation.

What to Watch Next

1. Whether the Supreme Court fixes the case for hearing: Yousafzai’s application asks for the matter to be listed next week. The court’s response — a date, or continued silence — will be the first concrete signal of how seriously it treats its own unimplemented order.
2. The complete medical record: Justice Waheed directed in September that Khan’s full medical record be submitted to the court, saying it would then no longer remain confidential. Whether the record is produced, and what it shows, will settle more than any press statement.
3. The 10 November appeals: The Islamabad High Court is due to hear the appeals of Khan and Bushra Bibi in the £190 million case on 10 November, the same week the hospital-transfer question may return to the Supreme Court.
4. The opposition’s all-parties conference: Opposition parties agreed on 4 November to hold a conference within ten days, with Khan’s health on the agenda. The conference will test whether the health question unites the opposition or exposes its divisions.
5. The sisters’ detention: The Lahore High Court’s intervention over the detention of Khan’s sisters is a separate thread, but it feeds the same narrative of restricted access — and Gohar has made their release one of his central demands.

Sources

• khabr.pk — “PTI’s Gohar voices concern over Imran Khan’s health, seeks early SC hearing” (citing Daily Times and the Express Tribune)
• Islamabad Post — “Reports about Imran Khan’s health not encouraging, says PTI chief Gohar”
• Particle News — “PTI Seeks Supreme Court Order to Hospitalize Imran Khan”
• Pakistan Point — “News About Imran Khan’s Health Are Not Encouraging: Barrister Gohar”
• Pak Souch — “SC seeks AGP’s legal assistance on FCC’s jurisdiction to hear Imran’s hospital transfer case”
• Zark News — “Pakistan’s Opposition Agrees to Hold an All-Parties Conference Within 10 Days, Raising Imran Khan’s Health Again” (citing Dawn)