ISLAMABAD: Former PTI senator Faisal Vawda filed a Supreme Court petition on Friday challenging the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP) lifelong disqualification and the Islamabad High Court’s (IHC) subsequent verdict.
The PTI leader appealed to the Supreme Court.
Last Monday, the Electoral Commission expelled PTI leader Faisal Vawda from parliament for life after he submitted a fake affidavit about his dual citizenship.
The electoral monitor found the PTI senator in violation of Article 62(1)(f), which deals with being “sadiq (truthful) and “amin” (honest). The article stipulates the requirements for becoming a member of parliament, and it is the identical provision under which former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was disqualified by the Supreme Court in the Panama Papers case on July 28, 2017.
Vawda then went to the IHC, but his request for the cancellation of his lifetime ban was dismissed by the court.
The ECP banned Vawda, according to the IHC, after deciding that he had presented a fake affidavit confirming his nationality to the commission while filing his nomination papers to run for election in Karachi’s NA-249 constituency in 2018.
The former senator has asked the Supreme Court to overturn the previous ECP ruling and reinstate his senatorship in an appeal filed today.
According to the appeal, the electoral watchdog lacked the authority to disqualify him for life, and the ECP was not a competent court of law.
Wasim Sajjad, Faisal Vawda’s lawyer, filed an appeal on his behalf.
The decision of the ECP had been hailed by the opposition as a huge setback for the administration. The government ministers, on the other hand, were upbeat about Vawda’s chances of getting a legal reprieve.
