Daily Times

A full court comprising 13 available judges will hear the Sunni Ittehad Council’s (SIC) reserved seats case on June 3.

A meeting of the three-member committee, chaired by Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Qazi Faez Isa, was held yesterday. By a majority of 2 to 1, the committee decided to form a full court of all available judges.

Justice Munib Akhtar dissented, proposing to form a bench of the seven most senior available judges instead. Justice Musarrat Hilali will not be present to hear the case due to illness. On Wednesday, PTI moved the Lahore High Court (LHC) seeking directives to the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to allot the party its electoral symbol of the “cricket bat” again.

It argued that a political party could not be deprived of its right to contest an election, particularly by withholding its symbol because of its failure to hold its internal polls.

Earlier this month on May 11, the Punjab Assembly’s move to suspend 27 lawmakers elected on reserved seats threw a spanner in the works for both the current party dynamics and the ruling coalition’s ambitions to maintain a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly (NA), casting a dark cloud over the government’s strong presence in the house.

Currently, the matter is pending before the SC where PTI-SIC challenged the allocation of the reserved seats for women and non-Muslims to political parties other than PTI-SIC and said it violates Article 51(6)(d) & (e) of the Constitution

It added that the ECP has acknowledged that SIC is a parliamentary party having 82 general seats in the National Assembly, therefore, it is entitled to reserved seats.

On May 6, after an appeal filed by the SIC, a three-member bench of the apex court suspended a Peshawar High Court (PHC) order for the allocation of additional reserved seats to different political parties in national and provincial legislatures.

The ECP on December 22 last year stripped the PTI of its election symbol in view of irregularities in its intra-party elections.

The SC later upheld the ECP order and the party had to field its candidates as independents in the February 8 general elections.