A new Punjab Chief Minister will be chosen tomorrow. People from the PML-N and PML-Q are running for the job of Punjab CM.
Before that, a division bench of the Lahore High Court on Friday told Deputy Speaker Dost Muhammad Mazari to run the election for the new chief minister of the province on April 16. (tomorrow).
The bench also told the deputy speaker to make sure that national and international observers, journalists, representatives of PILDAT, Fafen, and other groups, as well as other people, could come to the election for chief minister.
Bench: Shujaat Ali Khan and Justice Jawad Hassan told the chief secretary and the inspector general of police to make sure the election was safe on the day of the polls.
IGP Rao Sardar Ali, who was in the court, said that all possible steps had been taken to make sure the MPAs arrived safely and smoothly at the assembly. The secretary of the assembly would be in charge of the security inside the assembly, working with the security staff.
During a hearing in the court, Chief Secretary Kamran Ali Afzal told everyone that all of the departments had been told to help with the election of the leader of the house of representatives.
Whenever one side makes a claim against another person, the bench says that quickly, the person responsible for the crime will be punished.
It was a single-bench decision that the speaker and the PML-Q were disputing. The single judge made it a condition that the deputy speaker should be in charge of the chair, even though the speaker had already asked for permission to run for chief minister.
They also said that there was a vote of no confidence against the deputy speaker.
It was because of this that the two-judge bench didn’t believe the arguments of the appellants and agreed with the single-judge bench’s decision.
The bench, in its 31-page decision, says that since the speaker can’t preside over the assembly because he’s running for the job of chief minister, the deputy speaker will have to act as the speaker in order for the elections to be held on April 16.
It says that because Mr. Elahi, the speaker, is running for the job of chief minister, he can’t do his job as a speaker. As a result, the deputy speaker, Mr. Mazari, took over as speaker by law.
The bench says that a look at the rules from above makes it clear that only when the speaker or the deputy speaker aren’t there does a question about how the session is run through the panel of chairmen come up.
During the time that the deputy speaker is in the room, the appellants can’t send the case to the panel of chairmen on their own, the bench says.
People on the bench say it’s “strange” to see that, on the one hand, the appellants say that the court can’t get into their assembly’s business, but on the other hand, they want the court to pass an order that is against the rules from 1997.
Another argument from the appellants was rejected by the court. The bench said that since the motion of no confidence is not going to be discussed at the April 16 session of the assembly, the deputy speaker is not incompetent to be in charge of that session.
With these words, the bench ruled on the appeals against the single bench’s decision.
