LILONGWE, Oct. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- The Malawi High Court sitting in the capital, Lilongwe, has stopped the country's parliament from proceeding with the impeachment of President Bingu Wa Mutharika, which the house began on Friday.

   Richard Msowoya, a legislator from the government side in the national assembly, on Saturday asked the court to restrain the parliament from going ahead with impeachment of Mutharika arguing against its legality.

   Msowoya also asked the court to rule that the impeachment procedures that the parliament adopted on Thursday should undergo a judicial review to establish their legality before parliament began applying them.

   Justice Robert Chinangwa, who presided over the hearing of the application, granted Msowoya both his requests that the impeachment of president Mutharika in the parliament be stopped immediately and that the adopted impeachment procedures be scrutinized by the court through a judicial review process.

   Chinangwa ruled that the parliament was restrained from proceeding with impeachment of Mutharika until the court heard from other interested parties in the case.

   Senior Deputy Registrar of the High Court, Ken Manda, told Xinhua after the ruling that other interested parties in the case were expected to file their papers with the court on October 24.

   The Malawi parliament currently sitting in Lilongwe on Friday unexpectedly began the actual impeachment process of President Bingu Wa Mutharika and resolved that the president should begin defending himself on October 27.

   The parliament's move took the government side in the house by surprise and when Justice Minister Henry Phoya failed to reason with Speaker Louis Chimango to stop the impeachment process, all government legislators including cabinet ministers walked out of parliament in protest.

   The National Assembly on Thursday formally adopted the procedures that the house would be following when impeaching a sitting president or vice president.

   The issue for impeaching President Mutharika first surfaced in the national assembly in June this year but the house referred it to the house's Legal Affairs Committee for wider consultations.

   The committee's chairperson Atupele Muluzi, son to former president Bakili Muluzi, presented the report on the impeachment procedures to the parliament on October 14.

   Malawi's opposition parties, led by the former ruling United Democratic Front (UDF), have openly stated their intention to remove Mutharika from office.

   Mutharika, who won the presidency in May 2004 on a UDF ticket, angered the UDF party when he dumped it in February this year and set up his Democratic Progressive Party.  Enditem