By Muhammad Najeeb, IANS
Islamabad : Pakistan moved one step closer towards elections Friday as the third phase of the Jan 8 polls began with election tribunals hearing cases against the rejection and acceptance of nomination papers, including of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.
Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz, who returned last month after seven years of forced exile in Saudi Arabia, are among the 1,047 candidates whose nomination papers have been rejected by the Election Commission.
All of them can file an appeal against their rejection in the tribunals, headed by high court judges.
But Sharif, who also heads the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), has said he won’t appeal to judges who have taken oath under the Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO), which President Pervez Musharraf enforced Nov 3 after imposing emergency in the country.
Sharif, who was sent into exile by the military regime in 2000, a year after his elected government was overthrown, is demanding an independent judiciary, the lifting of emergency and free and fair polls. He may boycott the elections if his demands, backed by other smaller opposition parties, are not met.
His party is also negotiating a joint strategy with another former ruling party – Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) – to launch a campaign against Musharraf’s ouster.
Phase three of the elections will continue till Dec 14.
The National Assembly or lower house of parliament has 342 seats with 60 reserved for women and 10 for non-Muslims. However, both women and non-Muslims are eligible to contest direct polls as well as the reserved seats.
Elections are being held on 272 seats in all the four provinces – North West Frontier Province (NWFP), Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan – the federal capital and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). A total of 13,490 nomination papers have been submitted.
Final lists of candidates would be displayed Dec 16.