The Election Laws Amendment Act went through the committee stage on Wednesday, with the debate in the House potentially taking shape, as the PTI members strongly opposed, as it passed the committee by eight votes to four. The PPP member did not attend, while the JUI(F) member did not attend, thereby perhaps signalling what the respective parties might do when the House debates. It will be entirely up to Law Minister Shahid Nazir Tarar when the bill is reported back to the House, and when is is passed. It will then have to go the Senate for passage, before it can become law, but the committee proceedings gave a fair view of how the PML(N) and the PTI would respectively argue the cases for and against the Bill.
The bill proposes that no party would be allocated seats for the minority seats if it had not submitted a list on time. This is clearly meant to stop the newly created PTI parliamentary party from claiming reserved seats on the basis of the parties that have come into existence after the recent Supreme Court decision.
PML(N) members said that the law had been clarified, while PTI members said that the new law would represent a clash between the legislature and the judiciary. If that is so. It will be up to the Supreme Court to strike down the law, and possibly even suspend its operation after passage, as happened with the Supreme Court (Practice and Procedures) Act, which the Supreme Court ultimately accepted. However, it should be noted that it is up to the courts to interpret the law, but it is up to the legislature to change the law where it feels dissatisfied by any interpretation of the law by the Supreme Court. It is also a truism in parliamentary systems such as Pakistan’s that the Executive necessarily has a legislative majority, so it is actually going to be a clash between the Executive and the Judiciary.
It is perhaps a pity that clashes between these organs of state occur over their respective privileges and their composition. The Supreme Court has never made any ruling over a subject involving public welfare which the Legislature has found needed for the passage of an Act. Is the ordinary man merely the grass which gets trampled when elephants fight?
