The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Thursday moved the Supreme Court against the Peshawar High Court (PHC) verdict that annulled the electoral body\u2019s decision to declare PTI\u2019s intra-party polls \u201cunconstitutional\u201d and stripping the party of its iconic bat electoral symbol. \u201cThe Peshawar High Court decision should be declared illegal. PTI did not hold intra-party elections as per the Election Act,\u201d the ECP stated in its plea submitted to the top court. Minutes before the plea was filed in the apex court, the PTI filed a contempt of court petition against the ECP over its failure to comply with the order issued on the party\u2019s petition against the electoral watchdog\u2019s decision on its election symbol and intra-party polls. In its petition, the PTI has contended that despite the PHC orders issued a day earlier the ECP failed to upload the certificate on the PTI’s intra-party elections on its website. It added that failure to do so falls under contempt of court. The party has named Chief Election Commissioner Sikander Sultan Raja, ECP members and secretary as the respondents in the case. Earlier today, PTI\u2019s chief election commissioner Niazullah Niazi had submitted a certified copy of the PHC decision to the ECP in person. A day earlier, a two-member bench of the PHC comprising Justice Ejaz Anwar and Justice Syed Arshad Ali announced a short order on a petition jointly filed by PTI Chairman Gohar Ali Khan and six other party leaders, requesting the court to declare the ECP order as illegal and without jurisdiction. The order said the ECP decision of December 22, 2023 was \u201cillegal, without any lawful authority and of no legal effect.\u201d The court directed the ECP to publish on its website the certificate filed by the PTI after holding intra-party polls. \u201cIt is further held and declared that the PTI is entitled to the election symbol strictly in terms of Sections 215 and 217 read with any other enabling provision of the Election Act 2017 and Election Rules 2017,\u201d the order said. After the verdict, the ECP held a brief consultative meeting on the situation arising out of the restoration of the symbol of \u2018bat\u2019 for the PTI.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Thursday moved the Supreme Court against the Peshawar High Court (PHC) verdict that annulled the electoral body\u2019s decision…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13032,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news-updates"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}