By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party on Wednesday petitioned the Supreme Court to strike down a new law barring independent lawmakers from joining parties after a stipulated period, calling it an “unconstitutional” bid to undermine a recent top court ruling.
The law, passed by both houses of Parliament on Tuesday, aims to circumvent the Supreme Court’s July 12 ruling that granted PTI reserved seats and set it to re-emerge as the single largest party in the National Assembly.
The ruling had come after PTI contested the Feb. 8 general elections as independents, winning the most seats but initially being denied reserved parliamentary seats for women and minorities due to a technicality.
PTI candidates had to contest the polls as independents after the party was stripped by the election commission of its bat symbol on party’s flawed internal elections.
The commission ruled they were not entitled to reserved parliamentary seats for women and minorities that are allocated in proportion to the number of seats a political party wins in general elections.
PTI MNA Gohar Ali Khan filed a petition in the SC, requesting it to declare the newly passed amendments as “unconstitutional” and bar the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) from allocating reserved seats for women and minorities to other political parties.
“The instant petition seeks to challenge, therefore, subversion of the democratic process made by the Impugned Act and is, therefore, a petition that raises questions of immense public importance with reference to the enforcement of the fundamental rights, conferred by the Constitution, in particular the rights guaranteed by Article 17,” the petition read.
“Past and closed transactions that have taken place in terms of the Constitution and the Elections Act, 2017 prior to the enactment of the Impugned Act cannot be undone through the deemed retrospectively purportedly assigned to the Impugned Act,” it added.
“The expression of the will of the people once made cannot be retrospectively subjected to restrictions that were non-existent at the time, and that are in any case unconstitutional. Actions taken by the people and their chosen representatives in the exercise of their constitutional rights cannot be undone by parliament through legislation. Such legislation suffers from malice in law.”
The petition was filed under Article 184(3) of the Constitution, which sets out the SC’s original jurisdiction and enables it to assume jurisdiction in matters involving a question of “public importance” with reference to the “enforcement of any of the fundamental rights” of Pakistan’s citizens.
The federal government and the ECP have been made respondents in the case.
The bill, titled “Elections (Second Amendment) Act, 2024”, proposes changes to the Elections Act 2017 and suggests that a political party should not be allocated seats reserved for women and non-Muslim candidates if it fails to submit its list for the reserved seats within the prescribed time.
The law is designed to have a retrospective effect, meaning it would come into force from 2017 onward, when the original Elections Act was passed to become law.
Another amendment says that candidates should be considered independent lawmakers if they had not filed a declaration with the returning officer (RO) about their affiliation with a particular political party before seeking the allotment of a poll symbol.
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