LAHORE, Sept 13: The passage of amendments to the Legal Practitioners and Bar Council Act, 1973, by the National Assembly has created a new situation in the Pakistan Bar Council elections which may be delayed for one to two weeks.

The National Assembly adopted the amendments on the lines the law was changed by the Senate about four months ago. The new law envisages that the PBC will have a membership of 22 instead of 20 at present. Two seats in the apex statutory professional body have added to the quota of NWFP whose bar council will now elect four members for the PBC instead of two.

The president is still to give his assent to the law before the changes are incorporated in the act and notified in the gazette of Pakistan. Until the presidential assent is given, the unamended law will hold the ground.

However, sources understand that a new election schedule is bound to be announced by the next week, and the new PBC will be elected for the next five years under the amended law.

The sources believe that attorney-general Makhdoom Ali Khan may announce a new election schedule giving a concession to the candidates, who have already submitted their nomination papers by Sept 8, that their candidature will remain valid.

A new election is also due because some of the candidates have got their nominations proposed or seconded by members of other provincial bar councils. Since the amended law envisages to confine the electorate to one province, their nominations will be declared invalid in the scrutiny process if they are not allowed to rectify the defect.

The new provision of restricting PBC candidates to obtain votes from within the membership of the provincial bar council, means that the election will become an onerous job. This electoral exercise used to be easy when the whole of the country was the constituency for the candidates in the unamended law and many PBC members were returned to the body with votes obtained from all four provinces. In some cases, PBC members hardly got enough votes from their own province and were elected with support exclusively from other provinces.

It may be recalled that 37 lawyers filed their nominations for the 20-member PBC by Sept 8. The number may go not up substantially as and when the new election schedule is announced.