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- May 31, 2024
- Kainat Shakeel
- 0
The Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) filed a complaint over seats designated for women and minorities, and the Supreme Court (SC) assembled a full court bench to hear it on Friday. Judges Syed Mansoor Ali Shah, Munib Akhtar, Yahya Afridi, Aminuddin Khan, Jamal Khan Mandokhail, Muhammad Ali Mazhar, Ayesha Malik, Athar Minallah, Syed Hasan Azhar Rizvi, Shahid Waheed, Irfan Saadat Khan, and Naeem Akhtar Afghan make up the entire court bench, which is led by Chief Justice of Pakistan Qazi Faez Isa. The matter will be heard by the bench on Monday, June 3 at 11:30 a.m. Independent candidates supported by the PTI had already joined the SIC when they emerged victorious in the polls on February 8 and their party was stripped of its electoral emblem, the “bat.”
The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) determined in a 4-1 decision rendered in March that the SIC was not qualified to claim a reserved seat quota “because of non-curable legal defects and a violation of a mandatory provision of submission of party list for reserved seats.” Along with allocating the seats to other parliamentary parties, the commission also ruled that the PML-N and PPP would benefit most from having 16 and 5 extra seats, respectively, while the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam Fazl (JUI-F) would receive four. The PTI, meanwhile, ruled that the ruling was unlawful and dismissed it later that month, the Peshawar High Court (PHC) refused a SIC case that had challenged the ECP decision on reserved seats and dismissed the SIC plea.
The leader of the party, Sahibzada Hamid Raza, requested the Supreme Court in April to overturn the PHC ruling and reject the seats reserved for women and minorities in the SIC. On May 6, the Supreme Court postponed both the March 1 ECP ruling and the March 14 PHC judgment. Attorney General for Pakistan, Mansoor Usman Awan, suggested that the case should be heard by a larger bench under Section 4 of the Supreme Court (Practice and Procedure) Act 2023, as it involves the interpretation of constitutional provisions. The SC further ordered that the current petitions be placed before the three-judge committee that determines the constitution of the bench for the reconstitution of a larger bench.
There are 44 parliamentarians from PML-N, 15 from PPP, 13 from JUI-F, and 1 from each of PML-Q, IPP, PTI-P, MQM-P, and ANP among the suspended MPs. Consequently, the ruling coalition’s numerical strength dropped from 228 to 209, costing it a two-thirds majority in the lower house of Parliament for the time being. The magic number in the House of 336 to reach a two-thirds majority is 224. The PPP’s number in the House has dropped from 72 to 67, while the PML-N’s has decreased from 121 to 107. 22 National Assembly members who were elected to hold reserved seats for women and minorities are among those who have been suspended. Among them are three from JUI-F, five from PPP, and fourteen from PML-N.