Opposition seeks time on ECP appointments

Parliamentary panel to meet again on Dec 8

ISLAMABAD:

The parliamentary committee on the appointment of Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) members on Monday failed to reach a consensus regarding finalisation of the commission’s two members.

The committee is tasked with considering nominations by the government and the opposition for the appointment as ECP members from Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The committee could only manage to decide the date for the next meeting – December 8.

The committee, chaired by Minister for Human Rights Dr Shireen Mazari, deferred the matter after briefly deliberating it. Following the in-camera meeting, the chair revealed that the opposition parties sought time to decide about their choices once the elections in NA-133 are over.

“[The ECP] members will be appointed on merit,” Mazari said, saying the opposition had sought time to consult and decide about their choice of the ECP members from the two provinces.

PML-N’s Khawaja Saad Rafique said the talks were being held in a cordial environment, saying it was being tried that the government and the opposition should appoint the members purely on merit as the appointees should not belong to any political party and succumbed to any pressure.

“Good names have been proposed, but the best are still being searched,” Rafique said while clarifying that no new names could be added to the list of the proposed names.

“The government has proposed its names and shared their point of view,” Rafique said, adding the opposition parties would respond to that as well after discussing the matter in detail.

The focus is on bringing unbiased people in the ECP, especially, the ones who do not succumb to any pressure, he said, admitting that mistakes were made in the past.

In the larger interest of democracy and the country, he said, it was crucial that unbiased people should be appointed in the national institutions. “They [members] should not accept pressure from any person, group or institution,” he said.

Rafique recalled that the chief election commissioner’s name was proposed by the government and the opposition parties had endorsed it, saying the government shouldn’t simply call the names unacceptable just because the opposition has proposed them. He expressed the hope that the two ECP members would be appointed with consensus.

JUI-F’s MNA Shahida Akhtar Ali said that the appointment of the members was a constitutional issue and it would not have come before the parliamentary committee if the prime minister had not made it an issue of his “ego”.

For the appointment of the three members, Shahida recalled, the government had taken a whole year and a similar exercise was being repeated again on the appointment of the two other members. “That is why the matter is prolonging,” she said.

She said that the government had bulldozed the legislation process related to the ECP but was delaying the appointment of its members, which shouldn’t be the case. “They [government] did not perform its constitutional duty on time,” she lamented.

The 12-member committee includes Mazari, Defence Minister Pervez Khattak, Minister for Railways Senator Azam Khan Swati, Planning Minister Asad Umar, Information Minister Chaudhry Fawad, MNAs Rana Sanaullah, Khawaja Saad Rafique, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, Shahida Akhtar Ali, Senators Taj Haider, Azam Nazeer Tarar and Manzoor Ahmed Kakar.