ECP rejects PTI’S plea to club all foreign funding cases

ISLAMABAD: The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has rejected a plea of the Pakistan Tehrike-insaf (PTI) to club together all foreign funding cases before deciding a similar case against it.

The decision was announced by a threemember bench of the ECP headed by Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sikandar Sultan Raja during a hearing of the PTI foreign funding case.

At the previous hearing on April 19, the PTI sought three days — from April 27 to 29 — to conclude its arguments. However, instead of continuing with his arguments, PTI’S lawyer Anwar Mansoor Khan read out an Islamabad High Court (IHC) order that relaxed the 30-day deadline set to decide the foreign funding case and asked the ECP to carry out scrutiny of all parties without any discrimination.

Khan claimed the IHC had ordered that all foreign funding cases must be heard simultaneously and, therefore, he refused to make arguments.

However, the CEC insisted that the IHC order had made no such determination and noted that the PTI’S foreign funding case had already been delayed for almost eight years and thus demanded an early conclusion. He said hearings on other cases were in progress and a detailed report would be presented before the IHC on May 17.

During the hearing, the ECP was also asked to wait for the scrutiny commitee’s reports on foreign funding cases against the Pakistan Muslim League-nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) before proceeding further.

At this, an ECP member from Balochistan asked where the IHC order had bound the commission to wait for reports of the scrutiny commitee. The PTI lawyer’s applications against the PML-N and PPP funding had been submited in 2017. “The ECP should have immediately sent the mater to the scrutiny commitee five years ago,” he said.

However, CEC Raja assured Khan, PTI’S lawyer, that all three cases were being heard. He then asked the lawyer to give his arguments on the present case. But Khan refused to do so and insisted that the commission should first bring other cases on a par with the PTI case and demanded a level playing field.