ISLAMABAD:
A constitutional bench (CB) of the Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a request by the Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) to allocate reserved seats to the PTI in proportion to 39 MNAs who had declared themselves to be affiliated with the party while filing nomination papers for the Feb 2024 elections.
The eleven-member CB, led by Justice Aminuddin Khan, heard the petitions challenging the SC’s July 2024 majority order for allocation of reserved seats to the PTI.
On January 13, 2024, a three-member SC bench upheld the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP) December 22, 2023 order declaring the PTI’s intra-party polls null and void.
Later, the PTI candidates had to contest the February 8, 2024 general elections as independents.
Eighty such independent candidates reached the National Assembly and later joined the SIC in an apparent bid to claim reserved seats for women and minorities. The ECP, however, refused to allocate the seats to the party, a decision that the SIC challenged in the Supreme Court.
On July 12, 2024, a full bench of the apex court through a majority of 8 to 5 resurrected the PTI as a parliamentary party, noting that 39 of the lawmakers who had submitted certificates of their affiliation with the PTI along with their nomination papers were already PTI lawmakers.
The SC ruled that the remaining 41 lawmakers who had not submitted the affiliation certificates at the time of nomination papers’ submission could do that now within a period of 15 days.
At the last hearing, Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhail had observed that the majority decision declared 41 candidates as unaffiliated with any party and the ECP was right in the case of 41 and wrong in the case of 39. The SIC’s counsel requested allocation of reserved seats to the PTI based on the 39 MNAs.
During the hearing on Tuesday, Justice Muhammad Ali Mazhar asked if the ECP had declared all 39 lawmakers as belonging to the PTI.
Justice Mandokhail noted that based on the ratio of 80 seats, around 22 or 23 reserved seats should be allocated. Justice Mazhar asked, “If 39 members have been declared as part of the PTI, then why haven’t the reserved seats been allocated according to that proportion?”
The ECP director general (law) said seats would be allotted based on an overall figure of 80. To a query of Justice Hasan Azhar Rizvi, he replied that the seats have not been allotted to any other party so far.
The ECP’s lawyer argued that parliament had enacted a law after the SC’s July 13 verdict, stating that once a political affiliation was declared in the nomination papers, it could not be changed. He added that the law was applied retrospectively, and a review petition on the matter was still pending.
Later, the Supreme Court’s constitutional bench formally dismissed the request to enforce its decision regarding the allocation of reserved seats to PTI for the 39 assembly members.
Earlier, Faisal Siddiqui responded to the objection regarding the extension of the timeline for reserved seats. He stated that after the 2018 elections, the ECP issued a fresh schedule.
Employing a pun, he said when BAP — the Balochistan Awami Party, which is generally regarded as the king’s party — came forward, the schedule was issued. “After all, Baap is Baap (a father is a father),” he added.
