Web Desk (LTN NEWS): On Thursday, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) sent notices to National Assembly speaker Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), and others about a petition filed by the PTI about how its lawmakers’ resignations from the parliament were accepted “piecemeal.”
All of the PTI lawmakers quit at the same time on April 11, two days after former Prime Minister Imran Khan was kicked out of office after the joint opposition in parliament passed a vote of no confidence against him.
In April, Ashraf decided to verify the resignations of the 123 PTI lawmakers by calling them individually or in small groups. He did this because, according to a report in Dawn, about two dozen MNAs from the former ruling party asked him for a meeting to explain their position.
Sources in the NA Secretariat confirmed that most of the resignations handed in by PTI MNAs were not written by hand and had the same text printed on the letterhead of the PTI. They said that the secretariat staff had doubts about some members’ signatures because they didn’t match those on the assembly’s roll.
The 2007 Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in the National Assembly say that a member can give up his seat “by writing under his hand and sending it to the speaker.”
When PDM threatened mass resignations in 2020, when PTI was in power, former minister Sheikh Rashid said that printed resignations were not legal.
On July 27, 11 NA lawmakers gave their resignations to the party’s speaker.
MNAs who have been removed from their seats are Ali Muhammad Khan, Fazal Muhammad Khan, Shaukat Ali, Fakhar Zaman Khan, Farrukh Habib, Jamil Ahmed Khan, and Muhammad Akram Cheema, Abdul Shakoor Shad, Dr. Shireen Mazari, Shandana Gulzar Khan, and Ijaz Ahmed Shah.
So, the party went to the IHC earlier this week to ask for permission for all the PTI MNAs to resign and be denotified.
During the hearing today, Faisal Chaudhry, a lawyer for the PTI, said that his client had given the court the authority letters of all 123 MNAs, making them all respondents in the case.
He said that on April 11, the deputy speaker at the time, Qasim Suri, had accepted the resignations of all PTI lawmakers.
Chaudhry then took Suri’s April 13 order to the court. It said, “I have received the resignations of 125 PTI members of the National Assembly, as announced in the house by Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the party’s deputy parliamentary leader, on April 11, 2022.”
“I’ve read all of the resignations and come to the conclusion that, with the exception of Prince Muhammad Nawaz Allai, NA-12, and Jawaid Hussain, NA-47, all of them are genuine and made of their own free will,” the letter said.
The order also said that Suri had agreed to these resignations and told the gazette to report this.
Chaudhry also gave the court a list of all 123 MNAs from the PTI.
Justice Aamer Farooq sent notices to Ashraf, ECP, and the secretary of the Cabinet Division after hearing his case.
He also told the NA secretary that an authorized officer should bring all the records to court, and he put off the hearing until August 16.
PTI’s petition
Dawn.com has a copy of the petition that was filed on Monday. It said that after the “regime change operation,” the PTI leadership decided to resign from the National Assembly because it wanted a “fresh mandate” from the Pakistani people.
It said that 123 MNAs had turned in their resignations because of a decision made at a meeting of the Parliamentary Party on April 11 at the Parliament House. The deputy speaker had accepted those resignations.
But the newly elected Speaker of the NA, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, did not send these resignations to the ECP because he wanted to “so-called verify the resignations.”
The petition said, “Now, after about three and a half months, the NA Speaker accepted the resignations of only 11 MNAs of the PTI and sent them to the ECP, which denotified the lawmakers.”
“The so-called verification of the resignations of PTI MNAs by the current speaker of the National Assembly and his purported approval of the resignations and forwarding of the same to the ECP in a piecemeal manner, despite the fact that all 123 resignations of the PTI MNAs had already been accepted on April 11 by the then speaker, as well as the so-called action of the ECP to denotify the PTI Members in a piecemeal manner, are unsustainable,” said
It asked the court to tell the Speaker of the NA to let all of the MNAs from the PTI quit.
The petition also asked that the ECP be told to stop notifying all of these members at the same time.
