The Supreme Court has accepted the appeals of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government employees concerning their seniority and set aside the judgment of the Service Tribunal, observing that the state could not benefit from its own administrative mistake.
\nJustice Muhammad Ali Mazhar authored a 13-page judgment on the matter, allowing the employees\u2019 appeals and restoring their seniority to its original position.
\nThe Supreme Court directed that the employees\u2019 regularisation would be effective from March 7, 2018, observing that delay in publication of the regularisation notification in the official gazette could not prejudice their rights.
\nThe judgment held that employees could not be penalised for administrative delays and that the state could not take advantage of its own administrative error.
\n\u201cAn employee cannot be made a scapegoat because of administrative inefficiency,\u201d the court observed.
\nThe court noted that the delay in publication of the regularisation notifications in the official gazette was merely an administrative lapse and could not deprive the employees of their accrued legal rights.
\nIt further held that the date of publication of a notification could not be treated as the sole criterion for determining seniority.
\nThe employees had been regularised under the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Employees Regularisation of Services Act, 2018, with effect from March 7, 2018.
\nAccording to the judgment, regularisation notifications were issued on August 28, and October 17, 2018, while the notifications were published in the official gazette on August 21, 2024.
\nThe relevant employees had continued to be shown as senior in seniority lists issued between 2019 and 2023.
\nSome employees subsequently challenged the 2024 seniority list, following which the Service Tribunal set it aside and treated the delay in gazette publication as relevant to the determination of seniority.
\nThe Supreme Court, however, ruled that administrative delay in publication of the notifications could not invalidate the regularisation or adversely affect the employees\u2019 seniority rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Supreme Court has accepted the appeals of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government employees concerning their seniority and set aside the judgment of the Service Tribunal, observing that the state could not benefit from its own administrative mistake. Justice Muhammad Ali Mazhar authored a 13-page judgment on the matter, allowing the employees\u2019 appeals and restoring their seniority …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":101407,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102255"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102265,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102255\/revisions\/102265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}