ISLAMABAD: The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) will take up important petitions on April 22, including those seeking disqualification of Senator Yousuf Raza Gilani and PTI’s foreign funding case.
During the last hearing, the ECP accepted for hearing the petition seeking Gilani’s disqualification. The ECP also decided to issue notices to the former prime minister and his son Ali Haider Gilani over the video clip in which the latter was seen telling PTI MNAs how to waste a vote in the Senate election.
The commission had also asked PTI to include the names of two of its lawmakers as respondents, who were allegedly involved in the video. Advocate Amir Abbas, lawyer for PTI’s Alia Hamza, said it was the ECP’s duty to stop corrupt people from entering parliament.
“If someone accepts his corruption before the entire media, it is considered as a proof. Tribunals’ decisions do not take four years then. When the facts have been acknowledged, there is no need for forensics,” he added.
The ECP on the same day will also hear a complaint filed in the PTI’s foreign funding, challenging the decision of the electoral body’s scrutiny committee to keep the party’s financial documents secret.
In the petition, Mr Babar had assailed the scrutiny committee’s order of Feb 9 to keep the documents, including those of over a dozen undeclared bank accounts of the PTI revealed on the instructions of State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), secret.
In the complaint, the petitioner argued that the order to keep material forming the part of the scrutiny process secret was unlawful and far exceeded the mandate of the scrutiny committee.
The petitioner said that without having the entire record of scrutiny, he could not properly assist the scrutiny committee in reaching a credible conclusion.
