ISLAMABAD, February 26, 2019: The Provincial Assembly of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa passed two government bills and adopted a resolution condemning Indian violation of Pakistani airspace, observes Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN) in its Daily Factsheet.

Following are key observations of the House proceedings during seventh sitting of the fifth session:

Members’ Participation

• The House met for an hour and five minutes.
• The sitting started at 1502 hours against the scheduled time of 1400 hours.
• The Speaker presided over the entire sitting while the Deputy Speaker was also present.
• The Leaders of the House and the Opposition did not attend the sitting.
• The Leader of Opposition attended the entire sitting.
• As many as 45 MPAs (36%) were present at the outset while 65 (52%) at the adjournment of the sitting.
• The parliamentary leaders of PPPP, ANP and MMAP attended the proceedings.
• All minority lawmakers (three) attended the sitting.

Output

• Moved by the Minister for Law, the House passed the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (Amendment) Bill, 2019 and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (Second Amendment) Bill, 2019. The bills were introduced in the House on February 8, 2019. The Chair dropped the amendments proposed by an ANP lawmaker to the first bill.
• Jointly sponsored by treasury and opposition lawmakers, the House adopted a resolution condemning the Indian violation of Pakistani airspace near Balakot.

Representation and Responsiveness

• The government answered three out of 10 Starred Questions while seven questions were disposed of due to opposition’s refusal to move their questions. Their refusal was instigated by their defeat in a vote on a motion to refer a PML-N lawmaker’s question to the relevant standing committee.
• The House did not take up the Adjourned Motions (AM), Call Attention Notices (CANs) and a Privilege Motion due to protest.

Order and Institutionalization

• As many as eight lawmakers raised two Points of Order (POs) consuming 20 minutes of the proceedings.
• The opposition lawmakers staged a five-minute protest when the chair disallowed a PPPP lawmaker to raise PO.
• The opposition lawmakers also staged a ten-minute protest against discrimination with their constituencies in implementation of Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) projects.
• The House was adjourned sine die.

Transparency

• ‘Orders of the Day’ was available to the legislators, observers and others.
• The attendance of lawmakers was not available to the observers and media.

This daily factsheet is based on direct observation of the KP Assembly proceeding conducted by United Rural Development Organization (URDO) – a member organization of FAFEN. Errors and omissions are excepted