The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) withdrew their reference against the chief election commissioner (CEC) shortly after arriving at the registrar’s Supreme Court (SC) office on Thursday.
When the PTI leaders believed it would be better to include in the reference the alterations allegedly implemented in the prohibited funding case judgment by the CEC and to stress more legal matters, they had to change their thoughts.
Earlier in the day, Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) lodged a reference to the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) against Chief Election Commissioner Sikandar Sultan Raja.
The former ruling party sought the CEC’s ouster on grounds of willful mismanagement. The reference claims that the CEC was unable to carry out its constitutional obligations properly.
The PTI also requested that the SJC order the CEC’s dismissal due to his “consistent and purposeful misbehavior.”
According to the reference, on July 29, a delegation of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) met with the CEC and four other ECP members in his office to “push” him towards announcing the judgment in the illegal funding case. The Election Commission resolved to deliver the judgment on August 2 as a result of that meeting.
Thus, the CEC allegedly violated his oath, the reference argued, contending that the ECP’s decision was illegal, unlawful and coram non Judice. The PTI will challenge the order in court, the reference added.
The reference further argued the CEC had violated the ECP’s code of conduct and failed to fulfill its constitutional obligations. The code of conduct for judges of the superior judiciary applies to the chief election commissioner as well, the PTI said, adding a high court judge never discusses pending cases with any person or institution.
“The CEC must be removed from one of the most respectable and sacred constitutional posts,” the reference said.
According to the reference, the CEC denied various PTI applications in the prohibited funding case, including a request to hold a combined hearing in funding instances involving PTI and other parties.
The Islamabad High Court granted relief to the PTI, directing the ECP to treat all political parties equally, to hear their petitions with due diligence, and to resolve them within a reasonable time, according to the reference.
Instead, the reference claimed, that the ECP only issued a decision in the PTI case while leaving the other parties’ claims unresolved. “This is blatant bigotry.”
It is customary for Supreme Court judges to meet members of the Pakistan Bar Council, the Supreme Court Bar Association, and other lawyer organizations, but it was recently observed that the apex court refused to meet a delegation of the Supreme Court Bar Association during the hearing of the suo motu petition under article 184(3) of the Constitution in the “Parvez Elahi versus Deputy Speaker, Punjab Assembly” case because it was one of the parties in the proceedings.
The same regulation applied to the CEC, according to the reference, although he not only met with the PDM delegation but also admitted that they discussed the date of the judgment in the PTI prohibited funding issue.
The reference recalled that the Lahore High Court had asked the Election Commission in 2018 to dispose of a funding case related to the Peoples Party within one month. But the ECP did not comply with the directive “only to benefit (PPP chief) Bilawal Bhutto in the run-up to the general election”, the PTI alleged.
“The discriminatory attitude of the respondent has been noticeable time and again since 125 members of the National Assembly resigned their seats on April 9, which was accepted by former deputy speaker (acting as Speaker) Qasim Suri.
“Their resignations were published in the gazette on April 13 and sent to the ECP, but they were not denotified, whereas the current National Assembly Speaker, by doing an illegal and unconstitutional act, accepted the resignation of 11 members out of 125 and sent the reference to the CEC. He took no time to denotify them,” the PTI said.
The CEC delayed the process of denotification in the case of Mohammad Kashif Chaudhry, a PML-N member of the Punjab Assembly, according to the PTI. However, when Faisal Niazi, a former member of the Punjab Assembly from the PML-N, resigned his seat to distance himself from his party, the CEC allegedly delayed the denotification procedure.
According to the reference, the CEC has been fighting the deployment of Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) so that the PTI’s opponents “may utilize illegitimate means during elections.”
According to the reference, the PTI-led government in the Centre was deposed on March 8 through a “conspiracy begun upon the instructions issued by Donald Lu, a US Deputy Undersecretary of State.”
