The Election Commission has barred three former members of the National Assembly from contesting elections for failing to file their asset statements (Dawn).
Who
Zartaj Gul, Sahibzada Hamid Raza and Abdul Latif.
For what
Failure to submit the Statement of Assets and Liabilities — Form-B — for the financial year 2024-25, under section 137 of the Elections Act, 2017.
The order
“The commission vide Order dated 07.08.2026 has declared the delinquent ex-members of the National Assembly ineligible to contest any general election, by-election, Senate election and local government election.”
How long it lasts
Until they file. This is not a fixed-term disqualification: section 137 suspends eligibility while the default continues, and the remedy is entirely in the defaulter’s hands.
That distinction matters, because a bar that ends when a form is submitted is an administrative sanction, not a penalty. It is designed to compel a filing, and it succeeds or fails only on whether the filing arrives.
The context that complicates it
All three were sentenced to 10 years’ rigorous imprisonment by an anti-terrorism court in Faisalabad in July 2025, which triggered disqualification under Article 63(1)(h) of the Constitution.
So the practical effect of the ECP order is limited. Each is already disqualified on a separate and far more serious ground, and the constitutional bar does not lift when a form is filed.
What the order does is keep the administrative default on the record alongside the conviction — which is the ECP doing its own job rather than treating a court’s finding as making its own redundant.
What is not established
No response from any of the three has been reported. It has not been reported whether their convictions are under appeal, and this newspaper has not independently examined the July 2025 judgments. Readers should treat the convictions as reported facts about court proceedings, not as our assessment of them.
[Image: National Assembly website via Dawn]
