The fall of the House of Justice

In the spring of 2007, when black coats filled the streets and the lawyers' movement roared across Pakistan's cities, the country witnessed something close to a civic awakening. Ordinary citizens pinned their hopes on a simple ideal that the restoration of the judiciary could restore the rule of law itself. When Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry returned to office after defeating a military dictator, many believed the moment marked a turning point. A judiciary reborn. An institution cleansed by sacrifice. A chapter about to be written in a new ink.

Few Chief Justices in Pakistan's history have held the moral authority he held then. For the first time in decades, the judiciary had public legitimacy, political momentum, and the goodwill of a nation briefly united in a rare kind of optimism. He could have rebuilt the courts into a model institution. He could have redefined judicial restraint, institutional discipline and constitutional fidelity. Instead the opportunity turned to vanity. Power, once earned, became a temptation. Soon it became an addiction.

Chaudhry began to see himself as the saviour of the republic. He took suo motu powers and used them like a sledgehammer, swinging them into every domain of governance. He began fixing prices of sugar and petrol. He interfered in billion rupee government contracts. He rewrote policy from the Bench. The most catastrophic of his interventions came in cases like the privatisation of Pakistan Steel Mills and the blocking of the Reko Diq deal. Both decisions crippled the state financially and scarred Pakistan's investment climate for over a decade. It was the rise of judicial populism disguised as judicial reform. It was also the beginning of the end.

This culture of overreach seeped deep into the institution. Chief Justice Saqib Nisar expanded it by turning the court into a theatre of spectacle. He lectured bureaucrats, summoned ministers, inspected hospitals and raised funds for dams from the Bench. The boundaries that separate the judiciary from executive power dissolved slowly. Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed carried the baton forward, swinging it in Karachi's affairs with the zeal of an unelected city administrator. The principle of separation of powers, already fragile, fractured completely.

Meanwhile the court began to turn inward. The Bench became a battlefield. Judicial appointments grew contentious. Factions emerged. Principles bent easily. When Justice Umar Ata Bandial took oath as Chief Justice, the court entered one of its most politically charged eras. Controversial benches formed. High stakes political cases were rushed. Others were buried. Government after government accused the court of acting like a partisan player, not an impartial arbiter. The country watched judges disagree publicly, accuse each other obliquely and split into rival camps. The institution that once united the lawyers' movement had become an institution torn apart by its own contradictions.

Then came Justice Qazi Faez Isa. If the eras of Chaudhry, Nisar, Gulzar and Bandial fractured the judiciary, the Isa year finished the job. His arrival was packaged as a redemption arc. He entered office as the survivor of the Faizabad reference. There was a moment, brief yet genuine, when many believed that he could steady the ship. After all, if anyone understood the perils of state overreach, it was a man whose own career had nearly been annihilated by it. Instead, his tenure became the final match that set the powder keg ablaze. He made a series of pivotal choices at decisive political moments, each one tilting the balance in ways that unsettled the electoral landscape, left millions effectively disenfranchised and strengthened those already in power. When the full court finally tried to steady the scales, his dissent signalled that even a clear majority view was not binding and therefore need not be implemented, hollowing out what little judicial authority that remained.

This is the atmosphere in which the Twenty Seventh Constitutional Amendment arrived. The judiciary walked into the ambush with its eyes open, yet refused to see. Decades of overreach, self-righteousness, internal warfare and politicised decision-making made this moment almost inevitable. The political class saw a court weakened by its own behaviour. A court that had squandered its credibility. A court that had turned its institutional authority into a personal fiefdom for successive Chief Justices. The 27th Amendment never needed to storm the gates. The judiciary had been leaving them ajar for years.

And now the deed is done. The Superior Courts of Pakistan have been stripped of their independence in a single stroke. The constitutional architecture that once protected judicial autonomy has been dismantled. The court now stands before the executive not as a co-equal branch but as an obedient subordinate.

What remains now is the reckoning. The judiciary that once brought a dictator to his knees has surrendered without a fight. The court that once drew millions into the streets in defence of the rule of law has become an institution the public barely recognises. And the amendment that has rewritten its constitutional identity was not imposed suddenly. It was invited through years of hubris, infighting and judicial adventurism that steadily eroded its own legitimacy.

The tragedy is not only that the Supreme Court has been weakened, but that it was weakened by those entrusted to protect it. Each chief justice inherited a wounded institution and left it more fragile. Each moment of overreach emboldened the next. Each internal feud signaled to the political class that the court was ripe for capture. By the time the 27th Amendment arrived, the judiciary had already drained the authority it needed to resist it.

Pakistan now enters a more precarious phase. A judiciary unable to stand up to the executive cannot safeguard rights or act as a constitutional check. It may continue to hold hearings and pass judgments, but its ability to restrain arbitrary power has been gutted.

Institutions rarely collapse overnight. They decay slowly, decision by decision, silence by silence. The judiciary dug its own grave. What has been lost today will be felt most acutely when the country needs the court the most.