THE issue of dual nationality of public officials continues to rumble on, with the Senate on Monday passing a bill that prohibits senior civil servants holding dual nationality. It also deferred a resolution, at the government’s request, calling on the government to make the superior judiciary give details of judges with dual nationality. The issue of dual nationality is an emotive one, a debate grounded here in the specific political and historical context of Pakistan. This much is clear: there is little public acceptance of parliamentarians who possess dual nationalities and the superior judiciary’s attempts to weed them out of the assemblies have by and large been well received by public opinion. The danger, of course, is always that such debates can mask xenophobic or insular agendas and given Pakistan’s increasing drift towards isolationism, the debate needs to be grounded in rational and reasonable discourse.

Since the beginning of the superior judiciary-propelled debate on dual nationality, this paper has held that it is a reasonable bar on parliamentarians — who are specifically restricted by the Constitution from acquiring foreign citizenship. This should also hold for senior bureaucrats, judges and security officials. Given their various roles in making law, setting policy and executing policy, those senior state functionaries will invariably face a conflict of interest. How, for example, can a dual national in the Foreign Office or the Ministry of Commerce deal with issues pertaining to rights or privileges extended to a foreign country in a transparent manner that keeps Pakistan’s interests supreme if the individual making the decision has also pledged allegiance to that other country? Or, when it comes to matters of national security, on which even judges sometimes have to adjudicate in a limited manner, why should a state secret that is kept shielded from ordinary citizens of Pakistan be made known to a citizen of another country?

Clearly, other countries can and do allow senior state functionaries to hold dual citizenship. But context matters and in a fledgling system where public trust in state institutions and functionaries is yet to mature and be taken as a given, steps that could undermine that developing trust should be avoided. Which is why it is particularly surprising that the superior judiciary has thus far declined to provide information to parliament on dual-national judges on the grounds that the law does not permit it. If the superior judiciary is so zealous in its pursuit of dual nationals in other institutions, should it not necessarily offer itself up to the same level of scrutiny? The country deserves to know the truth.