The Islamabad High Court on Tuesday turned down Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf's (PTI) plea against the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) order for constituting a committee to scrutinize the party's foreign funding. A single bench of IHC comprising Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani dismissed PTI's petition challenging the PTI membership of Akbar S Babar and seeking court's orders to declare scrutiny of PTI foreign funding by the ECP Scrutiny Committee as unlawful.
Justice Kayani in his judgment noted about the question of membership of Akbar S Babar, "In my humble view, respondent No. 2 (Akbar S Babar) holds his status as member of PTI as per order dated 8-5-2017, passed by ECP and till the validity of his status, he can participate in the proceedings of ECP and after expulsion from the party, he can be precluded to join the scrutiny process and can only be called by ECP for the purpose of inquiry only, if so required by ECP."
On the question of ECP's powers to constitute a scrutiny committee for audit of PTI's foreign funding, the judgment said the ECP is fully equipped with the powers to call any individual, organization or department to provide the requisite information for the purpose of scrutinizing foreign funding unquote.
It was March 12 when the ECP had ordered formation of a fresh committee to scrutinize the PTI's accounts under the foreign funding case.
In his petition, PTI chairman Imran Khan prayed to the court to declare the proceedings initiated by the committee against him "void, unlawful, without lawful authority and against the Constitution."
He moved the court through his counsel Babar Awan Advocate and cited the ECP and Akber S Baber as respondents in the petition. The PTI chairman stated in the petition that the ECP through the March 12 order constituted a second committee, comprising three members that included two members of the first committee, who distanced themselves from the committee due to personal reasons, resulting in the first committee to dissolve.
He added that after dissolution of the first committee, a second committee was constituted "but the terms of reference of the committee are violative of the observation of the Supreme Court as well as order passed by the IHC." Khan said that the committee constituted by the ECP did not bother to read the orders passed by superior courts and shared all confidential documents with Akbar while Akbar made all the proceedings of the committee public via his social media accounts.
He contended while referring to the IHC's order passed on Sep 7, 2017 that the court had ruled that "the Election Commission of Pakistan shall not share the details of the source of foreign funding of the PTI with any other individual- including respondent No 2 [Akbar] till the final decision of this petition."
Imran's counsel maintained that Akbar's participation in the proceedings of the committee "is sheer violation of the guideline of the Supreme Court." He said Akbar did not come with clean hand because he approached the ECP after his expulsion from the party and "[Akbar] is not free from malice and ill-will and just aimed to harass the petitioner."
He continued that the impugned order is based on mala fide intents and was not passed in a transparent manner. He added that Khan, in compliance with the IHC's order, submitted all documents before the ECP. Therefore, he prayed to the court to set aside the ECP's March 12 order and declare the committee proceedings "void, unlawful and without lawful authority against the Constitution and law on the subject in the interest of justice."