YDA wants judges on PMDC election body

LAHORE:

Retired judges should be made part of the commission conducting the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council (PMDC) elections to ensure that they are free and fair, the Young Doctors Association (YDA) Punjab said on Saturday.

The YDA will launch a countrywide movement if the demand is not met and the elections are rigged, said YDA officials at a press conference at Jinnah Hospital.

Of the 42 PMDC seats up for election, the winners at 36 had already been decided through fraud, alleged Dr Shabbir Chaudhry of the YDA. He said that documents submitted alongside nomination papers by some candidates from the Punjab had been “deliberately misplaced” so that “favourites of the administration” could be elected unopposed at these seats.

He said that the interim executive committee of the PMDC was not supposed to participate in the elections, but four of its seven members had been elected unopposed, even though they had signed an undertaking that they would not take part in electoral activities.

The PMDC Act of 2012 states that a representative of the chief justice of Pakistan must be made part of the election committee, Dr Chaudhry said, but the chief justice’s nominee, Ghulam Rabbani, had not been included. The YDA Punjab urged the chief justice to take note of the situation, failing which the association would launch a countrywide movement, he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 5^th, 2013.