JUDGES in Pakistan are not popular right now. I was reminded of this when I spent an hour defending them on camera recently. It was for a podcast, where I’d been invited to talk about the 26th Amendment and wanted to laser focus on what I view as its most important and least understood feature — impact on regular citizens. The brutal attack on our individual liberties. The drastically reduced likelihood that we will ever see justice if we are wronged by powerful people. The fact that you and I and our future generations are less free because of it. I argued that all of this is an inevitable result of crippling the independence of the judiciary, so this amendment must be undone.
Most of the feedback was kind, but I tend to be more interested in critique, and noticed a sizeable one building up in the comment section. It’s a common argument that goes along these lines — ‘why should I care? What have these judges ever done for me? What shining beacons of justice were they lighting before getting defanged, that I’m now supposed to mourn being extinguished? They toppled prime ministers and legitimised dictators, failed the country at every critical juncture, behaved less like guardians of justice and more like unelected holier-than-thou despots, and now, after all of that, you expect me to rise up in their defence?’
It’s a view that seems rooted in trauma. There’s clearly a degree of schadenfreude involved too — the pleasure derived from the misfortune of others, particularly those you dislike. And while I view it as fatally flawed and firmly disagree with it, this view is widely held and deserves to be addressed with clarity and fairness.
For a start, it is built on two factually incorrect premises. The first is that the judiciary has done nothing for us. You could have countless critiques of all the times it fell short. I do too, and so do several sitting and former judges of the Supreme Court. But at its best, it has fulfilled a function that no one else in this country could dream of — keeping the powerful in check. That Pervez Musharraf did not rule over us till the grave is a testament to this fact. So too is the legacy of judges like A.R. Cornelius and Dorab Patel. It was a pre-amendment judiciary that banned the trial of civilians in military courts with a robust and well-reasoned judgement, and a post-amendment constitutional bench that overturned it on flimsy grounds of technicality.
Secondly, there is no proverbial candy that the judiciary once enjoyed and has been snatched away, that I am now arguing to be returned. In fact, the post-amendment political system has gone to great lengths to appease judges at taxpayer expense. Salaries and privileges have risen. The number of judges enjoying these privileges has increased in both the Supreme Court and Islamabad High Court. The courts theoretically maintain the same powers now as they did before (except for the suo motu). What has changed is that power has been taken away from certain judges. Specifically, those not added to a constitutional bench (by a commission dominated by ruling party politicians) can no longer decide constitutional cases.
What’s changed is that power has been taken away from certain judges.
What this means is that if you’re the kind of judge who likes to enjoy the grandeurs of high office and isn’t concerned with trivial things like integrity and impartiality, this amendment is a dream come true. All you must do is ensure the government is happy with you, present yourself as predictable and well-behaved, and enjoy your steady stream of rewards and promotions. The only judge aggrieved with this arrangement is the kind with the integrity and willingness to do their job, even if it means occasionally upsetting whoever is currently in power. And even then, they are condemned to silence.
Almost all critiques of our judiciary are rooted in demonstrable lapses in its independence. For those critiques to manifest into taking away what little independence it had left is nothing short of a joke. As self-defeating as riding alone through a desert, getting irritated at the slow gait of your horse, and deciding that the appropriate remedy is to shoot it in the head — because that would surely teach it a lesson. Maybe this is why those who passed the 26th Amendment don’t seem interested in defending it on the merits. They’d rather move on, present it as the status quo, and even double down with another fresh hell in the form of the 27th.
If all of this seems bleak, it’s because it is. This en masse assault on our freedoms was designed to feel overwhelming, irreversible, and confusing. And even if there’s not a lot we can do about it, we can at least be honest with ourselves. For our own sake. I’m not asking you to defend men in robes. I’m asking you to defend yourself.
The writer is a lawyer and columnist from Okara, based in Lahore.
X: @hkwattoo1
Published in Dawn, November 10th, 2025
