PESHAWAR: A tehsil council chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf on Friday moved the Peshawar High Court challenging the recent order of the Election Commission of Pakistan to suspend all local bodies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa until the holding of the provincial assembly elections.

In the petition, Mohammad Ishaq Khan Khattak, who heads the Nowshera tehsil council and is the son of former federal minister Pervez Khattak, requested the court to set aside the Feb 3 ECP notification, which stopped all elected local government “functionaries”from exercising their respective powers and functions until the local body polls were held in the province.

He also sought an interim relief in the form of a stay order against the impugned notification until the disposal of the petition.

The petitioner, whose lawyers were Nomanul Haq Kakakhel and Malik Shahbaz Khan, named the ECP through its secretary and the provincial election commissioner as respondents.

He contended that the local governments were established under Article 140-A of the Constitution, so their suspension by the ECP amounted to suspending that constitutional provision.

Tehsil chairman requests PHC to stay ECP move until case decided

The petitioner added that the local governments were necessary not only for strengthening democracy in the country but also for ensuring good governance for people’s welfare.

He said that he and other elected representatives of people were performing their respective duties and responsibilities with great zeal when the ECP, all of a sudden, issued a notification on Feb 3 declaring that the powers and functions of all elected local government functionaries had been suspended until the announcement of the results of general elections to the provincial assemblies of KP and Punjab.

The petitioner contended that the notification in question was illegal and beyond the powers of the ECP.

He contended that Article 140-A(2) of the Constitution bound the ECP to hold the elections of local bodies in terms of Article 140-A (1) read with the Elections Act and rules made thereunder.

The petitioner also said that under Article 218(3) of the Constitution, the ECP had the duty to organise and conduct elections without paralysing the rights of people to representation at local levels.

He added that it had not been a strong and cogent reason that free and fair elections of a provincial assembly could not be held without suspending the local bodies comprising the elected representatives of the people.

“By this logic, the federal government should also be suspended as it, too, can use powers and resources at its disposal to influence the outcome of the provincial assembly elections. If free and fair local body elections can be held in the presence of provincial governments, why is it not possible the other way round?”

The petitioner argued that the suspension of local bodies had disrupted preparations for the formulation of the next budget and annual planning for the next fiscal and that the ECP’s move would adversely affect the functioning of local governments not only in the current financial year but in the next as well.

He contended that there was no justification for disrupting elected institutions without clear and specific legal grounds.

The petitioner added that the suspension of local bodies would hamper the functioning of elected councils, developmental planning and delivery of services, while the people, too, would suffer “extremely.”

Published in Dawn, February 11th, 2023