On March 11, 1913, a rising barrister was quizzed on the judiciary by our British overlords. M. A. Jinnah was 36 years old; his interrogator was Murray Hammick of the Royal Commission on Public Services (and a future governor of Madras). Jinnah was arguing that a native might make as good a judge as any white man. For us poor stragglers in 2025, one exchange stands out: Hammick : How do you propose to recruit this higher judicial branch, which you say should be recruited from the bar? Jinnah : I should say by nomination only … [which] must be in the hands of an independent board. Hammick : What board would you have? Jinnah : I should like to have a board consisting of the judges of the High Court, and some of the leading members of the bar, because those are the only people who would be really competent to judge. Well over a century ago, Jinnah’s instinct was the correct one: that the rule of law is best guarded by judges appointing judges. Not the executive (read: the generals); not ruling party parliamentarians; and not — as one laughably effete suggestion has it — academics, commentators, social scientists, and Charlie’s aunt. To the Quaid, it would be judges and some of the bar. Sadly, this formula took a century to find its closest expression: in the judicial commission of the 18th and 19th amendments. While infiltrated by two of the executive’s men — the attorney general and the law minister — and saddled with a mostly defunct parliamentary committee, the judges nonetheless held sway. It was an arrangement far from perfect, but much better than the alternative: judges appointed by shahi firman . We know this because Pakistan’s history has proven Jinnah right and right again: as we’ve written in these pages , coups came gift-wrapped as early as 1954; ex-chief justices became Ayub and Yahya’s law ministers; Bhutto extended pliant judges, and Zia purged defiant ones. In fact, whenever the judiciary snatched back some degree of independence — whether in the Al-Jehad case in 1996 , or through a new commission in 2010 — it was in direct response to executive excesses: Benazir packing the court, or Musharraf placing judges under house arrest. The rise and rise of the suo motu, doubtless abused, was again a correction to Musharraf’s henchmen yanking a serving chief justice by the hair; the Lawyers’ Movement exploded into the streets soon after. All of which makes much of this year’s commentary around the judiciary so absurd: it’s almost as if activist judges were born in a vacuum, in a country that never saw four martial laws, far more PCOs, the physical storming of the Supreme Court, or the May 12 massacre in Karachi. And almost as if 2025 — the year of the 26th’s amendment’s consequences and the 27th’s birth — wasn’t the exact opposite of the founder’s vision. The ‘Constitutional Bench’ upends the Constitution The year began with the Pakistan that Qazi Faez Isa had left behind : judicial appointments stripped of their independence; a regime installed via a stolen election that the Isa court had shut its eyes to; and a ‘Constitutional Bench’ that fails to inspire public confidence. Never did a judicial successor have such a low bar to overcome. It is to the Yahya court’s distinction that the contest is now a close one. That is, if it can still be called a Yahya court at all, which didn’t author a single decision of enduring legal worth this year. It focused its energies instead on inventorying its broom closet — 6,344 cases have been “e-filed”, sings the Court’s website , and 8,735 judgments boast QR codes in the manner of ketchup bottles. At other times, it amused itself with painful bureaucratese: like permissions for foreign travel , or new codes of conduct demanding a near-monastic withdrawal from public affairs — both benefit mediocrities with nothing to contribute intellectually in the first place. If there was a new centre, it was the Constitutional Bench’s Justices Mazhar and Aminuddin, whose verdicts were at par with the executive’s wildest dreams. By the time the year closed, lawyer-columnists had dubbed the Constitutional Bench the treasury bench . Courts-martial of civilians return For starters, consider military trials of civilians: it took the combined might of the bogus practice and procedure law, the 26th amendment, and a second bench formed by Justice Isa to reverse the Court’s striking down such trials from two years ago. ‘Fair trial,’ held Justice Aminuddin in the appeal , ‘does not mandate that every forum must be identical in structure to regular courts.’ To support this remarkable statement, the Constitutional Bench reached for F. B. Ali’s case from half a century ago – all the better to try civilians today. But F. B. Ali centred on a coup-happy brigadier, a law from the era of Ayub’s long-dead 1962 constitution, and a decision at the height of Bhutto’s emergency – when fundamental rights were suspended. No matter: the bench just pretended the last fifty years hadn’t happened. In yet another throwback to the grim past, Justice Mazhar’s concurrence even brought out the Latin maxim salus populi suprema lex esto (the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law), an old favourite of Sharifuddin Pirzada’s for invoking necessity. So it was that military trials of civilians returned to the books. Yet even after so much engineering, the final tally still stood at 7-5 against military trials of civilians, both benches taken together. If the appellate verdict now holds, it is only as a result of the crudest gerrymandering – that too within the same Supreme Court. Reserved seats go to the losers As the summer hit, the Constitutional Bench also thought to undo the verdict of the voter: in one of the most controversial decisions of our legal history , it was held that reserved seats should go to the losing parties. Armed mainly with a single technicality — that the Sunni Ittehad was before the Court and not the PTI — the review bench reversed a decision that was superior in reasoning, broader in scope, and far truer to the spirit of the law. That a 12-member bench thought itself competent to review the decision of a 13-member original bench was unprecedented. No reasons were given. Equally unprecedented was that a review bench would include as its head the author of the dissent in the original verdict, Justice Aminuddin, but drop the eight-member majority’s author, Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah. No reasons were given. Then there was also the astounding fact of Justices Mazhar and Rizvi setting aside the original verdict of Justices Mazhar and Rizvi, when not a single novel argument was advanced before the review bench that they hadn’t heard previously. Again, no reasons were given. Oddly enough, the same Justice Mazhar spent four whole pages on the importance of precedent and how judges should ‘ honour the decision of prior cases ’ in the military trials appeal. Come reserved seats, however, and all precedent was tossed aside, including his own. (His Lordship also held in that same concurrence that judicial review merited a larger bench. The reserved seats review was, it bears repeating, one judge smaller.) Whether the Constitutional Bench was wrong in Shuhada Forum or wrong in Sunni Ittehad , we never found out. If anyone was wrong, it was the voter – for voting. ‘When a voter casts his vote for an independent candidate,’ held Justice Aminuddin , ‘he knows that his election will not result in having any impact on the elections to seats reserved for women and non-Muslims.’ Perhaps. But the voter likely didn’t know that Justice Isa would effectively disenfranchise him with the  bat symbol verdict, that the election commission would pretend the party he had most voted for – the PTI – had been dissolved, or that the Constitutional Bench would shanghai his votes and hand them over to the parties he expressly voted against. Hopefully, the voter will know more, and vote better, the next time. Until then, the reserved seats review has handed the unity regime a two-thirds majority it never won – and thus the very wrecking ball it would soon swing at the judicature. Dogar Court II With the Supreme Court fast sinking into irrelevance, it was thought to neutralise the last holdout of the post-restoration judiciary: the Islamabad High Court. It started almost as soon as the year began, when Justice Sarfraz Dogar was parachuted in from the Lahore High Court and, as the judges would later point out in a future petition , elevated to acting chief justice not two weeks later. Permanency followed. This extraordinary transfer was approved by Chief Justice Yahya and validated by Justice Mazhar: in his eventual judgment, the latter quoted the former , ‘The thoughtful consideration behind the proposal illustrated resolve in providing an equitable share to linguistic diversity of our country and fair chance of representation to all the federating units in the High Court of the common capital of the Federation.’ Linguistic diversity or no, Justice Dogar’s language soon became noteworthy instead for his widely condemned remarks addressing lawyers Imaan Mazari and Hadi Ali Chattha; these were censured by the Karachi Bar Association, while the Lahore High Court Bar Association called for his removal. (The judge later said his statement, reported verbatim, was taken ‘out of context’.) Perhaps it was also out of context that blameless lawyers – some of them Islamabad’s most capable – were hit with anti-terrorism FIRs for no other reason than peacefully protesting the suspension of Justice Tariq Mahmood Jahangiri. Which brings us to the other timeline for this story, one that kicked off in the summer before last: when Islamabad’s election tribunal, headed by Justice Jahangiri, was looking into allegations of widespread vote rigging. On 21 May 2024, Justice Jahangiri ordered that NA-47’s returning officers appear or else face arrest. Some days later, he provided a last opportunity to PML-N MNA Tariq Fazl Chaudhry for submitting his Form-45 to the court. On 23 May 2024, 48 hours after Justice Jahangiri’s order, the University of Karachi received an application seeking the verification of his law degree. This sordid drama would climax just a few days ago, when Justice Dogar ordered that Justice Jahangiri be denotified as judge. In fact, if the cost of courage versus compliance has to be measured, one needn’t look further than the contrasting fortunes of the Federal Constitutional Court and the Islamabad High Court to know which is which. Islamabad’s Justice Babar Sattar, for example – whose bravery and brilliance sequentially upset the PTI, the PDM, and the establishment – passed landmark decisions on the right to privacy and against illegal surveillance; on asylum, on rape victim testimony, on child marriage, and on competition regulation. His jurisprudence both clarified the law as well as actively upheld citizens’ rights. Yet for Justice Sattar as well as the courageous Justice Sardar Ejaz Ishaq, tax references are in the offing instead , while Justice Kayani continues to be precluded from the chief justiceship that should have been his a year ago. Or, as the five Islamabad judges summed up themselves in their case before the Supreme Court, ‘The demolition of the IHC and its independence that is being witnessed today is only because the petitioner judges dared to object to the executive’s interference in their judicial work and uphold their oath as judges of the IHC.’ But under the unity regime, such oaths weigh heavy. Jokes are illegal Meanwhile, the ‘unity’ parliament, fractured and compromised, also chose to immunise itself from the naughty words of the public. In February, it took just fifteen minutes to pass the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act, 2025 ; a law advertised as a cure for ‘fake news’ and administered, with far greater efficiency, as a remedy for dissent. This has been a part of the law’s DNA for long: since its enactment in 2016, Peca has done less to protect women or counter terrorism than to hammer journalists and dissidents, a record that human rights groups continue documenting with weary consistency. But the 2025 amendments cross into full Orwell territory: undefined offences of ‘fake’ or ‘false’ information, and a ban on ‘aspersions’ against the state, are now the new normal. That means everything from satire to memes has turned into prosecutable risks. And why not? In a land where laughter is fast becoming the last refuge, few phrases disturb the centre more than ‘Form-45’; the safer course is to suppress the utterance itself. Enforcement has followed: between summary trials and frozen accounts, the state alone determines the nature of truth. Statistics bear this out. From January to July, 99 cases were filed against journalists under the amended law for alleged ‘anti-state’ acitivities. In this, Peca joins a venerable tradition: to the British master, sedition charges were thought the best medicine for sharp tongues. So it carries on. The 27th’s mindless talking points As if the 26th weren’t enough, the latter half of 2025 was consumed by calls for the judiciary’s further immolation in the form of a Federal Constitutional Court. The cons and cons of such a trainwreck have been written at length, and can be read here . Three judges of the superior courts have since resigned out of principle, and the quality of justice is much poorer for it. Of course, such principle could have changed entire outcomes, at least in the Supreme Court, had it been deployed as early as the bogus practice and procedure decision, or when bizarre dissents arrested the holding of elections in 90 days. Equally bizarre  is the dishonesty with which such an amendment continues to be sold. Electoral losers that somehow find themselves in parliament, boomer cultural critics, even some lawyers writing in Dawn , have shrugged off the destruction of the judiciary by arguing how awful it was anyway: the soaring pendency, the bottoming out in global indices, and pharaohs for chief justices. They also point to political leaders – in the main, premiers Bhutto, Gilani, and Sharif – paying with their life or their ministries at the hands of the judicature. Too often excluded from such criticism is what the judges should actually be most reviled for: like constantly ushering the jackboot into the palace, from Dosso to Zafar Ali Shah . (Then again, it would be silly to overtly criticise that which is being implicitly defended.) Besides the Sharif-Bhuttos’ attacks, there’s also a fair bit of conservative rage over other verdicts: the establishment’s over Pervez Musharraf’s treason sentence, as well as the PTI’s for the midnight reversal of Imran Khan dissolving his assembly, which ended with the fall of his government in earnest. Let’s presume all those decisions were wrong. Let’s presume that, besides the obvious fact of his sham trial, Mr. Bhutto wasn’t actively trying to murder Ahmad Raza Qasuri and that all seven Supreme Court judges (including the three dissenters) were in error for sentencing his FSF hitmen to die. Let’s presume – letter sent or unsent – Asif Zardari wasn’t convicted for corruption by a Swiss court, and that the Sharifs actually did establish the documentary genesis of their London flats in the run-up to all that goofy iqama business. Let’s also presume General Musharraf was within the law for declaring emergency just to kidnap judges, and that Imran Khan could shut down and then erase the parliament he was directly answerable to, just to get around the no-confidence vote. That the judges got it backwards each one of those times. Is the solution to past injustice ensuring that justice can’t ever be done in the future, for anyone? Put another way, was a single prominent decision of the now-redundant Constitutional Bench actually constitutional? A more honest reason is revenge: that it was high time the third branch was put in its place. But those exulting that the judges deserve it seem to be yelling into the abyss: one that saw the quiet retirements of Iftikhar Chaudhry and Saqib Nisar eons ago, and a decline in suo motu ever since. Because, in the ultimate analysis, the judiciary was chained not for what it got wrong, but what it got right. The bogus practice and procedure law came on the heels of the Court ordering elections in 90 days. The 26th amendment was rushed through the assembly to counteract sensible verdicts in the reserved seats and military trial cases. The Islamabad High Court was torpedoed after six of its judges protested interference; Justice Jahangiri’s persecution began as soon as he tried shedding light on last year’s polls. Finally, the 27th amendment’s FCC — a civil law mutant in a common law country — was thought the permanent fix to what has now passed into history as the post-restoration judiciary (2009–2023). As both its admirers and enemies agree, what began with Iftikhar Chaudhry’s return concluded with Umar Ata Bandial’s retirement. In the time since, two successive chief justices lowered the drawbridge from within, and then showered the invasion with roses. And if said invasion was the state’s revenge, then only the citizen suffered in 2025. It is prayed the new year free us of such wanton experiments, and be kinder to Pakistan and its now-buried justice system. As for those that cheered this destruction on, it is sincerely hoped they can remain as cheerful when facing, inevitably, the new kind of courts they have installed. That might speed up the realisation that worse judges are, in fact, worse for everyone.