ISLAMABAD, Oct 16: The Supreme Court on Monday asked the government to provide a list of parliamentarians who were not allowed to caste votes during the parliamentary proceedings or were prevented from participating in other business over the past decade.
“Heaven would not have fallen if Makhdoom Javed Hashmi, Alliance for the Restoration of the Democracy president, was allowed to cast his vote for the Senate elections,” a two-member bench comprising Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and Justice Mohammad Nawaz Abbasi observed, adding that a constituency should never go unrepresented.
The bench also decided to hear Attorney-General Makhdoom Ali Khan and asked National Assembly Secretary Ziaul Haq to provide complete history as to how many parliamentarians had been detained in the past 10 years but allowed to attend house proceedings.
The bench was hearing an appeal filed by Maimoona Hashmi seeking permission for her detained father, Makhdoom Javed Hashmi, to cast his vote in the March 10, 2006, Senate elections for a federal capital seat.
On March 8, 2006, the Rawalpindi Bench of the Lahore High Court had dismissed her petition by upholding the Election Commission’s decision of not allowing Javed Hashmi to attend the session of the National Assembly for taking part in the election.
Advocate Zafar Ali Shah, the legal counsel of Maimoona Hashmi, cited the example of Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal president Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Mian Mohammad Aslam and PML-N member Khawaja Saad Rafiq, who were allowed to caste votes despite the fact that they were arrested in connection with violence during opposition demonstrations to protest against publication of blasphemous caricatures in some European newspapers.
