LAHORE: A full bench of the Lahore High Court has ruled that the candidates for local government elections can pick their proposers and seconders from the same ward in which the elections are being held.

The bench headed by Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah issued the ruling allowing five and dismissing 74 identical petitions filed against two conflicting decisions of two different single benches. Justice Ayesha A. Malik and Justice Ali Akbar Qureshi are the other members of the bench.

The bench took up two questionsraised in the petitions --whether the proposer and seconder under rule 12(2) of the LG Election Rules must be from the constituency from where the candidate has been nominated and whether having a proposer or a seconder in the nomination paper from another constituency is a defect of substantial nature and cannot be remedied by the returning officer at the time of scrutiny under the rules.

After hearing arguments from the parties, the bench observed that statutory requirement of a proposer and a seconder to be from the same constituency was provided in Rule 12 (2) of the LG Election Rules. The rules say any voter of a constituencymay propose or second the name of any duly qualified person to be a candidate for an election of a member or, as the case may be, the Chairman and the Vice Chairman of that constituency.

The bench said the rule mandated that a voter must be from the same constituency from where the candidate is contesting elections. `This is both, an expression of confidence in favour of a candidate to represent the constituency and also an affirmation, that the electoral constituencyis beingrepresented,`it added.

It further said as elections were being held in a ward which is a delimited electoral area, to fill the seat of a general member, a ward is,therefore, a constituency and the proposer and the seconder must be from the same said ward/constituency for the nomination papers to meet the requirement of Rule 12(2).

The bench rejected an argument that a ward was not a local government under section 2(v) of the Act, and the proposer and the seconder must be from the local government i.e., union council (any of the six wards), instead of a ward.

If this was correct, certain wards in a union council would go unrepresented and this is against the spirit of representative democracy and equitable representation of electoral constituencies, the bench concluded.