LAHORE: In light of the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP) revised timetable, the Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) requested a stay on the distribution of reserved seats, but the Lahore High Court (LHC) denied their appeal on Wednesday.
The next hearing was scheduled by Justice Chaudhry Muhammad Iqbal, who also directed the federal and local governments to provide their responses.
Punjab Khalid Ishaq, the advocate general, contended that since several parliamentarians had already taken an oath, the response would only cover those who have not yet been sworn in.
Attorney Chaudhry Ishtiaq A Khan, representing the petitioner, asked the court to postpone the swearing-in ceremony. Judge Iqbal responded by stating that the respondents’ responses have to be filed first.
Earlier, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)-backed SIC coalition of legislators filed a plea before the LHC contesting the ECP’s recent decision to distribute reserved seats to other political parties.
After earlier being refused its desired reserved seats, the SIC asserted that the ECP’s decision was unconstitutional and illegitimate.
After the SIC’s request was denied, the ECP started the process of distributing the contested reserved seats to other parliamentary parties. Notifications from the commission state that the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) are among the parties that have been allocated reserved seats for women and minorities.
Sahibzada Muhammad Hamid Raza, the chairman of the SIC, filed a plea in which he declared the ECP’s order to be unconstitutional and asked the court to halt its implementation. In addition, the petition asked the court to postpone the respondents’ oath-taking until after a decision was made.
The SIC claimed that the ECP’s distribution of reserved seats was unconstitutional and asked the court to order the commission to assign seats in accordance with the party’s strength in the Punjabi province house and the National house.
Representing the SIC, advocate Ishtiaq A. Khan argued that on February 21, 2024, the petitioner had submitted four letters to the ECP requesting the party’s just share of the reserved seats. However, it is purported that the ECP disregarded these requests and set a preliminary hearing for February 27, 2024.
The petition also made clear that the ECP had instructed other parties to get the reserved seats after declining to provide them to the SIC in an order that was made public on March 4, 2024. The SIC contended that the Election Act of 2017 and other sections of the Constitution were improperly read and applied by the ECP.
The chairman of the SIC stressed that Article 51 of the Constitution should take precedence over the election commission’s dependence on the election timetable and the deadline for submitting the priority list, as stipulated in Section 104 of the Election Act.
