The Peshawar High Court dismissed the Sunni Ittehad Council’s petition challenging the Election Commission of Pakistan’s decision to reject the party allocation of reserved women and minority seats.
In a 4-1 verdict earlier this month, the electoral watchdog ruled that the SIC was not entitled to claim quota for reserved seats “due to having non curable legal defects and violation of a mandatory provision of submission of party list for reserved seats which is the requirement of law”.
The SIC — joined by PTI-backed independents who won the elections sans their electoral symbol — had filed the petition through its chairman, Sahibzada Muhammad Hamid Raza, seeking directives of the court for the ECP to allocate reserved seats to the council based on their strength in the national and provincial assemblies.
The commission had also decided to distribute the seats among other parliamentary parties, with the PML-N and the PPP becoming major beneficiaries. Meanwhile, the verdict was rejected by the PTI as unconstitutional.
On March 6, a two-member bench of the PHC had barred the oath-taking of lawmakers allotted the reserved seats. It issued a pre-admission to the ECP and all the respondents in the case, listing six questions that needed to be determined. The next day, a five-member larger bench extended the bar until March 13.
Yesterday, Attorney-General for Pakistan Mansoor Usman Awan and the counsels for the PPP and ECP had completed their arguments.
AGP Awan had argued that a political party could get reserved seats only if it won a general one. ECP lawyer Sikander Basheer Momand had supported his arguments, stating that the SIC was a political party but not a parliamentary one.
Today, the bench — led by Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim and including Justices Ijaz Anwar, S.M. Attique Shah, Shakeel Ahmed and Syed Arshad Ali — resumed hearing the case.PTI’s Ali Zafar appeared as the counsel for the SIC and completed his arguments, following which the court reserved its verdict and said it would announce it at 1pm.
At the outset of the hearing, Zafar informed the court that 86 independent candidates from National Assembly, 107 from Punjab Assembly, 90 from KP Assembly, 9 from Sindh Assembly and one from Balochistan Assembly had joined the SIC.
