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- April 20, 2024
- Kainat Shakeel
- 0
PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister and cabinet have been ordered by the Peshawar High Court (PHC) to call a meeting of the assembly within two weeks to make sure that the people elected to the reserved seats for women and non-Muslims take an oath of office. In its 24-page detailed ruling on three identical petitions filed by roughly 20 MPAs-elect of the opposition in KP, a PHC bench made up of Justices Syed Mohammad Attique Shah and Shakeel Ahmad also directed the provincial assembly speaker to administer the oath to the aforementioned MPAs-elect during the session that will be requisitioned in compliance with the court’s order.
Even though the bench did not give the CM or the provincial cabinet any such instructions in its brief order on March 27, the court ordered both parties to “take all material steps in terms of Article 109 along with all enabling provisions of the Constitution for summoning the session of the provincial assembly within fortnight positively, after receipt of this judgment, so that the oath is administered to the petitioners in term of Article 65 of the Constitution before the upcoming Senate election” in its detailed judgment. In a brief order, the PHC instructed the speaker to appoint petitioners to the Senate during the April 2 meeting, as well as to assist with voting. However, because the KP government failed to call a session, the ECP was forced to postpone the province’s Senate elections and make them contingent on the aforementioned oath-taking.
Currently, the MPAs-elect are requesting the implementation of the short order and the initiation of contempt proceedings against the speaker and the deputy speaker in several applications filed in the high court. The speaker is asking the court to review its order. The PHC has ruled that the current government is violating the Constitution by not taking an oath of allegiance to representatives of marginalized communities. This is preventing these individuals from participating in assembly sessions and exercising their right to vote in the April 2 Senate election. This was due to a disagreement over the distribution of reserved seats, except for the Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC), which holds a majority in the KP Assembly.
The court decided that, in light of the ECP’s notifications designating the petitioners as MPAs elected on reserved seats, the assembly secretary was legally required to notify the CM to requisition the assembly session and administer the oath to the petitioners. However, the assembly secretary neglected to fulfill this legal obligation for reasons that are best known to him. Shazia Tehmas Khan and nineteen other MPAs from the PPP-P, PML-N, JUI-F, and PTI-P were among the petitioners who asked the court to deem it unlawful and unconstitutional for the speaker and deputy speaker to have failed to convene the assembly to administer oaths.