Fafen launches paper on election reforms

The Free and Fair Election Network (Fafen) on Saturday brought out a Paper that unifies various laws for governing elections in the country and provides a roadmap for reforms in election-related legal framework in Pakistan.
This Paper is expected to support the on-going efforts of the Parliamentarians and their Committees, the Election Commission of Pakistan and political parties in shaping the electoral reforms' legislation to have quality of elections.
The Paper titled as "A Unification of Pakistan's Election Legislation including Model Provisions for Electoral Reforms" has been developed as a part of the FAFEN's Election Law Reform Project that was initiated in 2009 with the technical and financial support of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES).
The Paper has unified Pakistan's fragmented election-related legislation for the purpose of uniformity and effective enforcement. In addition, the Paper offers legal amendments in the existing election laws to bring them in conformity with the changes warranted by the 18th Constitutional Amendment Act 2010. Another significant aspect of the Paper is a series of recommendations based on electoral reforms' proposals put forth by national and international stakeholders, to augment the consistency of the country's election law with its international obligations and best practices.
Section I of the Paper deals with the Unification of the Law. It offers a brief overview of a "fragmented" system of legislation that currently guides electoral processes and explains the benefits that would come with establishing a unified Election Act. It carefully explains the process that the Election Law Reform Project has to unify various election-related laws into an Election Bill. It also compares the provisions of the current election-related laws with the provisions of the proposed Unified Bill. It is important to note that in introducing a Unified Bill, the drafters were specifically instructed that they were not to change the law as it currently stands but instead provide an accurate accumulation of all the existing legislations. Section II of the Paper deals with the changes necessitated by the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. Building on the careful assessment of the 18th Amendment's impact on the election-related laws in their current form, Section II focuses on the influence that the Amendment would have on the Unified Bill outlined in Section I. The section provides a table by which readers can easily identify the changes that the 18th Amendment requires in relation to the provisions of the Unified Bill being proposed.
A final section offers a series of "model provisions" introduced as part of FAFEN's effort to reform Pakistan's current electoral legislation so that it is more consistent with the international obligations. The Unified Bill provides the opportunity to government, Election Commission of Pakistan and individual parliamentarians to draw from the model draft, while introducing a uniform law to govern the election process in the country.