LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) on Thursday declared Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leader Umar Aftab Dhillon’s petition, challenging the Election Commission of Pakistan's (ECP) order declaring PTI’s intra-party polls as "unconstitutional", inadmissible, Geo News reported.
Announcing the verdict reserved a day earlier, LHC Justice Jawad Hassan dismissed the plea. The ECP, through its decision against the intra-party polls, had also withdrawn the PTI's iconic electoral symbol ‘bat’.
Dhillon, seeking to regain his party's electoral symbol in Punjab, pleaded with the court on Wednesday to rescind the commission’s order and direct it to publish the PTI’s certificate for the intra-party election on its website.
The petitioner claimed that the symbol was illegally withdrawn as the matter of intra-party polls did not fall within the jurisdiction of the electoral body. He said the ECP was not a court of law and it could not question the validity of appointments within a party or intra-party election.
The complainant’s lawyer said different tactics were being adopted to create hurdles for the PTI candidates as first they were being stopped from filing nomination papers and then they were not being allowed to use the ‘bat’ symbol.
During the arguments, the PTI lawyer said the Peshawar High Court (PHC) had reinstated the party's electoral symbol. Justice Jawad, responding to him, said the PHC verdict on an appeal against the order was still pending.
The government’s lawyer rendered the plea non-maintainable saying the PTI leader was not directly affected.
A day earlier, the PHC restored the election commission’s December 22 order declaring PTI's intra-party elections as unconstitutional.
The decision deprives the PTI of its head and the electoral symbol. A single bench of the high court — headed by Justice Ijaz Khan — vacated the single bench’s December 26 stay order, which had suspended the ECP’s decision till January 9 and allowed the PTI to use ‘bat’ as its symbol.
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