Emmanuel OchayiThe Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) has dismissed the 2023 election report by the European Union (EU).
The court has expunged a crucial document, the European Union (EU) Election Observers Mission report, and rejected a stack of 18088 blurred results sheets, raising eyebrows and sparking heated debates.
The PEPC’s ruling, which sent shockwaves through the legal community, centered on the authenticity and admissibility of the evidence presented by the petitioners. Peter Obi and the Labour Party (LP) had tendered the EU Election Observers Mission report as part of their case.
However, the court declared that the document had been obtained from the PEPC’s registry, and the certification was provided by a staff member who was not the original custodian of the EU report. This unexpected move has left many questioning the court’s reasoning and the implications it may have on the overall case.
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What adds intrigue to this development is the fact that the report in question had already been submitted by Atiku Abubakar and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) during their prosecution of the petition.
This raises questions about the selective acceptance of evidence and the potential impact on the overall credibility of the legal proceedings.
Equally surprising is the court’s rejection of the 18088 blurred results sheets presented by the petitioners. The grounds for this rejection were that the results were not tied to specific polling units, a detail that the petitioners failed to specify in their case.
The court strongly criticized the petitioners for asserting that they couldn’t identify the polling units due to the blurred sheets. It pointed out that one of the petitioners’ own witnesses had managed to produce an analysis of the same results, claiming to have sourced them from INEC’s results viewing platform.
Furthermore, the court emphasized that the petitioners’ admission of their agents signing for and collecting copies of the result sheets raised doubts about their inability to specify the affected polling units.
The ruling has sparked a debate over whether the petitioners deliberately chose not to include this crucial information in their petition.
As the legal battle unfolds, this unexpected twist in the PEPC’s decisions has cast a spotlight on the intricacies of the case and raised questions about the fairness and consistency of the court’s rulings.
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