IN January this year, the National Assembly passed a private member’s bill to amend Section 138 of the Elections Act, 2017, which may blunt, if not totally reverse, the legal requirement of making public the submitted annual statements of assets and liabilities by national and provincial legislators by the Election Commission of Pakistan. The amendment would create an exception allowing the presiding officer of a legislature to ask the ECP to keep a member’s statements confidential if the presiding officer determines that publication would pose a serious threat to the member’s life or safety.

The bill was forwarded to the Senate but, fortunately, has not yet been passed. Earlier, the ECP was pressured into discontinuing the practice of posting the Gazette Notification of legislators’ statements of assets and liabilities on its website, and people were constrained to purchase a hard copy of the Gazette Notification through a complicated and time-consuming procedure, diluting the intended transparency guaranteed by the law.

This is not the first attempt to undermine laws requiring transparent information about elected public officials or about those aspiring to public office. The Elections Act, 2017, was a landmark piece of legislation that included several electoral reforms but, unfortunately, did away with the legal requirement for each candidate for public office to submit some 19 declarations under oath along with nomination papers. The declarations provided and made public information such as candidates’ assets, liabilities, educational qualifications, tax........

© Dawn