ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court of Islamabad has set May 8 as the date for hearing the plea of the Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) against the Peshawar High Court’s verdict that deprived the party of reserved seats.
A three-member bench, headed by Justice Mansoor Ali Shah and comprising of Justice Muhammad Ali Mazhar and Justice Athar Minallah, will hear the case regarding SIC’s reserved seats.
The Peshawar High Court had retained the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP) ruling that denied reserved seats to the party and rejected the SIC’s plea.
The SIC’s plea field a month ago states that the PTI candidates joined the SIC after their party lost its electoral symbol, adding that the ECP also raised no objections to the above independent returned candidates joining the SIC.
“The Impugned Judgment is based on a fundamental misconception and misinterpretation of Article 51 as well as Article 106 of Constitution, 1973,” the petition read.
Earlier, the PTI Chairman Barrister Gohar announced intentions to challenge the verdict of the Peshawar High Court (PHC) regarding reserved seats in the apex court. It’s planned that they will request the Supreme Court to assemble a larger bench to address the matter of reserved seats.
The PHC had dismissed the petitions of the Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) concerning reserved seats in assemblies. A unanimous decision was reached by a five-member bench of the high court, with Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim delivering the reserved verdict.
During the proceedings, Barrister Ali Zafar apologized for his absence and stated that PTI’s election symbol ‘bat’ was allocated before the election, compelling candidates to run as independents.
In response to questions about the number of seats in the National Assembly and provincial assemblies, the SIC lawyer revealed that the party holds 86 seats in the NA, 90 in KP, 107 in Punjab, nine in Sindh, and one in the Balochistan Assembly, totaling 226 seats. He emphasized that the SIC is entitled to 78 reserved seats.
The lawyer further argued that the Election Commission had overlooked the SIC’s entitlement to reserved seats, granting them to other political parties instead. He likened the situation to someone encroaching on vacant land, indicating that some political parties had requested the ECP to allocate these seats to the SIC.
