PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court (PHC) on Wednesday suspended a notification of Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) and restored Local Government representatives across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
During the proceedings today, the Deputy Attorney General told the court that the ECP had the powers to suspend local government representatives in order to ensure transparent elections, adding that this was not the first time that they had suspended local government representatives as the same had happened for elections in 2018 as well.
To this, Justice Roohul Amin asked that going by this logic, will the LG representatives be suspended many times, were the provincial assemblies suspended during these municipal elections or only the municipal representatives will be suspended?
After hearing the arguments, the PHC suspended ECP’s notifications and restored Local Government functionaries across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
CASE BACKGROUND:
The ECP on February 3 had suspended all local government functionaries in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa till the announcement of the election results of both provincial assemblies.
To justify its decision, the ECP had stated that it wanted to ensure that the general elections of the provincial assemblies were held in an ‘honest, just and fair’ manner, and to prevent any action on the part of the local government institutions that amounts to influence the results of upcoming general elections by depriving candidates from having a level playing field.
On February 10, a PTI tehsil council chairman moved the Peshawar High Court challenging the recent order of the Election Commission of Pakistan.
In the petition, Mohammad Ishaq Khan Khattak, who heads the Nowshera tehsil council and is the son of former federal minister Pervez Khattak, requested the court to set aside the Feb 3 ECP notification, which stopped all elected local government “functionaries”from exercising their respective powers and functions until the local body polls were held in the province.
He also sought an interim relief in the form of a stay order against the impugned notification until the disposal of the petition.
