Peshawar High Court (PHC) on Thursday stayed the decision of the Election Commission of Pakistan for re-polling in PK-95 Lower Dir-II, where women were barred from voting. The decision was taken in the light of a petition that was submitted by the winning candidate of Jamat-e-Islami, Aizazul Mulk Afkari, against the ECP's decision. A two-member bench, headed by PHC Chief Justice Mazhar Alam and Justice Arshad Qaiser, heard the case.
In the petition, JI maintained that women who had appeared before the court and said that they were barred from voting belonged to an NGO. The petitioner, who is also JI's emir of Lower Dir, who had appeared before the court maintained before the two-member bench that the women who appeared before the court and claimed that they were barred from voting belonged to a non-government organisation (NGO). Ayesha Syed, a JI MNA also informed the court that women were not barred from voting, but they had willingly not come out to vote.
In the light of the arguments, the bench suspended the ECP's decision of re-polling in PK-95. None of the around 53,000 women voters in the constituency turned up to exercise their right to vote during the by-election held on May 7. The seat had fallen vacant because Jamaat-i-Islami chief Sirajul Haq had resigned from it after being elected as a senator.
The ECP took notice of the matter when reports emerged that political parties had in effect barred women from taking part in the electoral exercise and questions were raised about how such polls could be termed free and fair. On June 2, the ECP announced that it had annulled the by-election held on May 7. Earlier, around 12 women from the constituency had approached Peshawar High Court through a petition, asking for the election to be declared null and void and to unseat Jamaat-i-Islami's elected candidate. However, Peshawar High Court dismissed the petition. It was pertinent to mentioning here that during the 2013 General Elections, no female voter turned out to cast their votes in Lower-Dir district after a jirga decided not to allow women to vote in the Lower Dir constituency.
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