The Impeachment Recommendation Committee has decided to summon Chief Justice Cholendra Shumsher Rana next week to furnish clarifications on the allegations leveled against him in the impeachment motion.

Endorsing its working procedure and the timetable, the committee on Wednesday decided to summon Rana before the committee on August 31. “The committee will serve the summons on Rana,” Laxmi Prasad Gautam, secretary of the committee, told the Post. “He will get time to defend himself before the committee.”

As many as 98 lawmakers of the ruling coalition—the Congress, the Maoist Centre and the Unified Socialist—had on February 13 registered the motion in Parliament against Rana with 21 charges. They claimed that Rana had promoted corruption in the judiciary, given access to middlemen for bench shopping, which is a term used for the unscrupulous practice of selecting benches through middlemen to ensure a favourable order, bargained with executives and failed to discharge his duties effectively among others.

Rana remains suspended from the day the motion was registered.

The committee has decided to call Rana for the clarification some five months after its formation. The 11-member committee, which has four lawmakers from the CPN-UML, two each from the Nepali Congress and the CPN (Maoist Centre), and one each from the CPN (Unified Socialist), the Janata Samajbadi Party and the Loktantrik Samajbadi Party, was constituted on March 6.

On August 7, the House of Representatives sent the motion to the committee to probe the charges made against Rana in the impeachment motion.

Ram Bahadur Bista, a Nepali Congress lawmaker who is chairing the committee as the eldest member, said apart from the decision to invite Rana, the committee has also agreed to conclude the probe either on September 7 or 8. “We have to work on a tight schedule to prepare and submit the report before the tenure of the House comes to an end,” he told the Post. “There is unanimity in putting the motion to a vote in the next 15-20 days.”

It requires a two-thirds majority in the 271-strong House to endorse the motion.

As per the Election Commission, the lower house can function until September 17, a day before the parties submit the closed lists of candidates for the November 20 elections.

Rule 163 of the Regulations of the House of Representatives allows the recommendation committee a maximum of three months, from the day it starts work, to probe the allegations. The committee, however, has to complete the entire investigation in two weeks.

Bista says there are challenges in completing the tasks in the prescribed time. “We have to publish the notice seeking proof against Rana’s alleged misdeeds and we might have to talk to multiple people,” he told the Post. “Substantiation of the allegations is most complex and time consuming. Yet we are committed to completing it.”