No coordination among ECP, parliament

Shaharyar Afridi was in house despite being temporarily banned

ISLAMABAD: Shaharyar Afridi’s presence, a PTI lawmaker, during Thursday’s proceedings of the National Assembly exposed a lack of coordination among election authorities and parliament.

At that time, his NA membership had temporarily been suspended for not filing his asset details with the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on October 15.

He is among 20 lawmakers, including 17 of the Sindh Assembly, two of Punjab Assembly and Afridi himself from the National Assembly, who did not file their statements till Friday afternoon.



Afridi told reporters he filed his account statements on January 2. But, ECP officials contradicted his claim, saying that they received details on Friday.

Viral videos

A day after parliamentarians traded blows with each other in the House and their videos went viral, the Speaker of the National Assembly banned lawmakers from making videos of parliamentary proceedings.

Earlier, the Speaker called for formulating a code of conduct to avoid such incidents in future.

On Friday, Speaker Ayaz Sadiq termed the scuffle a “most unfortunate incident”.

Expressing displeasure, he said that both the treasury and opposition benches used “non-parliamentary language”.

Subsequently, he suspended the proceedings for 30 minutes and called parliamentary leaders of all parties in his chamber.

After half an hour, Bashir Mahmood Virk announced to adjourn the session till Monday.

Shaikh Aftab, Abdul Qadir Baloch, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Naveed Qamar and others participated in the parliamentary committee’s meeting.

The speaker requested all parliamentary leaders to help him create an amicable environment to run the House.

Sources said, relevant officials of the NA secretariat briefed parliamentary leaders about the scuffle and showed them video footages.

The sources said the opposition questioned who had slapped Shehryar Afridi and why had Shahid Khaqan Abbasi approached the opposition benches: this had basically triggered the brawl.

Later, the Speaker said that a code of conduct would soon be devised to stop the use of non-parliamentary language and gestures besides formalising a strategy for protecting the dignity of women in parliament.

He said he offered to resign, but all parliamentary leaders reposed their confidence in him.

He said the issue of moving a privilege motion against the prime minister was also discussed.

According to the speaker, lawmakers had agreed to slap a ban on making videos in parliament. A similar meeting would be held on Monday at 3pm.

He maintained that the privilege motion was not the basis of the scuffle. He maintained that he had learnt via the National Assembly’s Secretariat that Shehyar Afridi’s membership was already suspended.

PTI moves privilege motion

Meanwhile, PTI moved a privilege motion against a few PML-N members, including Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Mian Manan, Captain Safdar and others, who scuffled in the NA on January 26. The privilege motion stated that PTI lawmakers were specifically targeted.

“Abbasi abused opposition MNAs and not just PTI,” the motion stated.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2017.