The Pakistan Bar Council (PBC) on Friday “strongly condemned” the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP) decision to conduct fresh delimitation and “delay elections” beyond the constitutional limit of 90 days.

On Thursday, the electoral watchdog released the schedule of delimitation for provincial and national constituencies. According to it, the ECP expects to complete the delimitation exercise by December 14.

The announcement of the schedule, necessitated by the recent approval of the census results by the Council of Common Interests, effectively means that elections cannot be held in 2023.

The decision came 10 days after the official results of the census were notified and a week after the dissolution of the National Assembly.

Article 224 of the Constitution binds the watchdog to conduct the general elections within 90 days of the assembly’s dissolution. Section 17(2) of the Elections Act, on the other hand, reads, “The commission shall delimit constituencies after every census is officially published.”

Earlier, an ECP official told Dawn that the commission was not legally bound to “immediately” carry out fresh delimitation of constituencies after the official notification of census results. He pointed out that official notification of the final results of the previous census had been issued in 2021, while the ECP had published limits of constituencies in August 2022.

In a press release issued today, PBC Vice Chairman Haroon-ur-Rashid and Executive Committee Chairman Hassan Raza Pasha expressed “grave concerns” over the ECP decision.

They said the “delimitation schedule of redrawing constituencies, issued by the commission, is a tactic to delay polls” and expressed that Article 224 of the Constitution bound the ECP to conduct general elections within 90 days of the dissolution of assemblies.

The PBC stressed that it was the ECP’s duty “to conduct free, fair and transparent elections within the stipulated period as mandated by the Constitution”.

The press release added that free and fair elections were the only way out from the current “worse economic condition of the country”.

The PBC is not the first to oppose the electoral body’s decision. A day earlier, the PTI rejected the delimitation schedule and termed it a “ploy to delay the polls”.

The party announced that it would challenge the decision before the Supreme Court today. PTI spokesperson, in a statement, said the ECP’s schedule of redrawing constituencies was based on malicious intent in a clear deviation from the Constitution.

Delimitation schedule

The ECP will complete the delimitation exercise by Dec 14. As the first step, the boundaries of administrative units across the country have been frozen.

Delimitation committees for all the provinces and the federal capital will be formed by Aug 21.

The administrative arrangements for delimitation, including the requisition of maps along with other necessary data, description of districts and tehsils from provinces, obtaining the district census reports, etc, would be completed between Aug 22 and Aug 30. Training will be provided to the delimitation committees from Sept 1 to Sept 4.

District quotas for national and provincial assemblies will be shared with delimitation committees from Sept 5 to Sept 7.

Preliminary delimitation of constituencies will be prepared by the committees from Sept 8 to Oct 7, and published on Oct 9 after which people will present their objections and recommendations to the ECP on the initial delimitation from Oct 10 to Nov 8. The ECP will hear and decide the objections from Nov 10 to Dec 9. The final list of constituencies will be published on Dec 14.

Separately, the electoral body issued a set of directives for “all those in service of Pakistan” to assist it in the process of delimitation under Article 220 of the Constitution.

It directed provincial chief secretaries, chief commissioner, federal government and the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics to provide the ECP with the notification of census changes, census circles and census blocks, maps in respect of census changes along with descriptions, copies of consolidated master maps of urban areas showing census changes/circles/blocks in metropolitan corporations, municipal corporations, municipal committees and town committees, list of revenue units authenticated by the authority with units and latest district maps.