GILGIT, Jan 9: Majority of the Northern Areas Legislative Council (NALC) members agreed to adopt the proposed amendments regarding the upgradation of the council status.
Sources said four NALC members, Shah Baig, Rehmat Khaliq, Mehboob Ali and Haji Amirjan, all belonged to Diamer district, and an adviser, Haji Janbaz, disagreed with the proposed amendments in the working paper ostensibly due to pressure from their voters.
Council Speaker Haji Sahib Khan reserved his ruling for Wednesday session, though the majority of the house had evolved a consensus on the proposed amendments, the sources said.
The speaker observed that he would study the objections and reservations of the dissenting NALC members on the issue and could only give his ruling after removing their reservations and other bottlenecks.
A working paper recommends that the chief executive for the Northern Areas be elected from the among the council members with the powers presently given to the minister for the region. The local chief executive be given the status of a provincial chief minister and also a post of Lieutenant governor be created to represent the Federation of Pakistan in the Northern Areas, it adds.
The working paper also proposed that the council be renamed as the Northern Areas Legislative Assembly (NALA). The provision of a deputy speaker of the NALC has already been fulfilled by the government.
The paper further seeks that the Northern Areas Legislative Assembly be vested with the authority to resort to any amendments in the LFO for the region exactly on the pattern of Azad Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Council that has the authority to make any amendment(s) to the provincial constitution.
The paper proposes that the Northern Areas Legal Framework Order be renamed as Northern Areas Provisional Constitutional Order. It also says that in view of the remoteness of the region and its backwardness, the proposed NAs Legislative Assembly be vested with the powers of identifying and according approval to development schemes in the region.
The sources said the federal government had already accepted this demand and the NALC members had been vested with the powers to identify development schemes in their respective constituencies.
The paper demands that any member of the NALA or elected chief executive, as the case may be, should be included in the federal cabinet as adviser, minister or special assistant to the prime minister or the president so as to grant representation to the region in the federation.
The paper also recommends to establish an independent judicial set up, a public service commission and an upper house in the Northern Areas.
An NALC member and its legal committee chairman, Syed Jafar Shah advocate, told Dawn that they prepared the recommendations on the request of former chief executive Abbas Sarfraz Khan on May 17, 2000.
He said the recommendations had been forwarded to the KANA ministry, the law department and the foreign office which had again sought advice from the NALC legislators on the proposed amendments.