Former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan, who has been convicted and jailed on graft charges, was barred from politics for five years yesterday, an official order said.
The order by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), seen by Reuters and confirmed by a senior officer, said Khan was disqualified in line with his conviction.
“Imran Ahmad Khan Niazi is disqualified for a period of five years,” it said.
Khan’s constituency would now stand vacant, the order added.
Under Pakistani law, a convicted person cannot run for any public office for a period defined by the ECP, which could be up to a maximum of five years starting from the conviction date.
“We knew this was inevitable,” Khan’s aide Zulfikar Bukhari told Reuters, saying the party will challenge the disqualification in high court.
“We’re highly confident it will be reversed,” he said.
“We’ve submitted an appeal... our plea requests a temporary suspension of the trial court’s ruling and seeks bail,” Khan’s lawyer Gohar Khan told AFP.
“The court will take up the case today and because the sentence is short we hope that Imran Khan will be granted bail in (several) weeks’ time.”
Another of his lawyers warned authorities would try to delay the process.
“Currently there is no rule of law in Pakistan, we are rushing from one court to another,” said Mishal Yousafzai.
Khan, who has denied any wrongdoing, was sentenced to three years imprisonment on Saturday on charges of unlawfully selling state gifts he and his family acquired during his tenure from 2018 to 2022. He was arrested at his Lahore house and taken to a prison near Islamabad.
Khan’s legal team has filed an appeal seeking to set aside the verdict, which Islamabad High Court will take up today, his lawyer Naeem Panjutha said.
The petition seen by Reuters described the conviction as “without lawful authority, tainted with bias”, and said Khan, 70, had not received an adequate hearing.
It said the court had rejected a list of witnesses for the defence a day before reaching its verdict, calling this a “gross travesty of justice, and a slap in the face of due process and fair trial”.
Khan has been at the heart of political turmoil since he was controversially ousted as prime minister in a vote of no-confidence last year, raising concern about Pakistan’s stability as it grapples with an economic crisis.
With Khan out of the political picture for now, all eyes should be turning to an upcoming election, South Asia Institute director at the Washington-based Wilson Center, Michael Kugelman, told Reuters.
Any delay in the election — due by November — would fuel more public anger and inject more uncertainty into the political environment, he said.
“That volatility and uncertainty could have implications for political stability but also the economy, if foreign investors and donors become reluctant to deploy more capital in such an environment,” he said.
In June Pakistan secured a last-gasp $3bn deal with the IMF, which has sought a consensus on policy objectives among all political parties.
Khan’s legal team says he is being kept in abject conditions in a small, so-called C-class cell in a prison in Attock, near the capital Islamabad, with an open toilet, when he should qualify for a B-class cell with facilities including an attached washroom, newspapers, books and TV.
A request had been filed on his behalf for an A-class cell with all the facilities he was entitled to.
Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah, who spent several months in jail on drug trafficking charges he says were fabricated during Khan’s tenure, said that Khan himself had been a proponent of uniformity in prisons.
The reaction to Khan’s jailing so far has been vastly different to the outpouring of rage that followed his first arrest – even on social media, with half as many Facebook posts mentioning Khan’s name.
“The muted response to his arrest is because of the full-throttle crackdown on PTI workers after the first arrest,” columnist Usama Khilji told AFP.
“The arrests of PTI workers post the May arrest of Imran Khan coupled with draconian laws passed in haste by (the coalition government) have had a chilling effect on Pakistani citizens.”