ISLAMABAD, March 2: With the term of the current parliament set to expire in a couple of weeks, the Supreme Court was asked through a petition on Saturday to order verification of degrees of the 223 parliamentarians whose educational qualifications were never scrutinised.

Filed by Advocate Maulvi Iqbal Haider, the petition pleaded that out of 1,095 lawmakers in the country the educational degrees of only 759 could be verified or attested by the Higher Education Commission (HEC). About 100 legislators were disqualified for possessing fake degrees while the cases of 19 lawmakers were pending before relevant courts.

The name of Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, the leader of the opposition in the National Assembly, has also been mentioned in the petition because his educational certificates have yet to be verified.

Therefore it was necessary, the petition argued, that the degrees of the remaining 223 lawmakers should be verified without which they should not be allowed to participate in the upcoming general election. The petition recalled that a delegation of around eight parliamentarians, including Law Minister Farooq H Naek, met Chief Election Commissioner Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim recently and during the meeting it was decided that the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) would not write directly to the lawmakers asking them to get their certificates verified.

Thus these parliamentarians, according to the petition, are held to be immune from the attestation of the educational degrees. This is against all norms and would discriminate against those members whose degrees were scrutinised and later held to be counterfeit and they had to be disqualified, the petition contended.