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No easy going yet for court-cleared aspirants

Disqualification on the cards even if elected; EC decides to launch legal battle

Shakhawat Liton
The Election Commission (EC) will challenge the court orders that have enabled the loan defaulters and convicted individuals to be candidates in the December 29 parliamentary polls.
"We will contest the cases at an appropriate time,” Election Commissioner Brig Gen (retd) M Sakhawat Hossain told reporters yesterday at his office.
"If the Appellate Division's ruling in the end goes against a candidate who has participated
in the election on the High Court's order and won, he will be disqualified as a member of parliament," he added.
The EC has already consulted a former attorney general regarding the rulings, sources in the commission said.
The lawyer has suggested that this time the EC challenge the orders and get to the bottom of the matters.
The EC faces legal problems before every general election, but seldom pursues those once the election is over. The commission first planned to go to the apex court to appeal the latest rulings that have cleared candidacy of 21 individuals it ruled out. But it opted not to do that at this time as the move might hamper holding of the parliamen-taYy' election on sources said.
According to the EC and Bangladesh Bank (BB). around 80 individuals have obtained court orders in favour of their candidacy’.
The EC has been made respondent in over 30 cases while the central bank in the rest.
For the commission, the courts issued direct orders and asked it to file regular appeal later. For BB. the rulings came as stay on their including certain candidates in the list of loan defaulters.
The candidates in question will have to go to the courts for hearing after expiry of the stays.
The commission will contest the cases if necessary in consultation with BB, sources in the EC said.
As per the electoral laws, if a polls winner is finally proved to have been disqualified by the EC justly, his parliamentary membership shall be revoked and a fresh election will be held.
At least 48 individuals obtained stay orders from the Supreme Court on operation of the central bank's decision to list them as loan defaulters and filed nominations to contest the parliamentary polls, said a senior BB official.
He said the bank has already assigned lawyers to contest the cases against its list of defaulters.
The official said the number might be even higher as some candidates obtained stay orders much before the announcement of the polls
schedule.
Besides, the EC earlier included 11 in the final list of candidates on court orders though it had screened them out for defaulting on loans and utility service bills and con-cealinginformation.
The commission on Thursday decided to allow 21 such candidates to be in the polls. The returning officers have already allocated electoral symbols to 18 of them.
The EC Secretariat was preparing to send another three names to the ROs concerned for allocation of symbols.
The court orders that came when the EC's preparations for the polls including printing of ballot papers were at the final stage have left the EC in a difficult situation.