26th, 27th amends 'destroyed Constitution'

Former Supreme Court judge Mansoor Ali Shah has proposed a comprehensive roadmap to counter "autocratic tendencies", warning that judicial independence often erodes under "concentrated power" and calling for stronger legal, institutional and cultural safeguards to prevent such a collapse.

The former apex court judge delivered a speech at the NYU Research Symposium on Legal Empowerment and Autocracy in Accra, Ghana.

"I speak today as someone who resigned from the Supreme Court of Pakistan on 13 November 2025, because I could no longer uphold an oath to protect a Constitution from within a court that had been stripped of the authority to protect it," Justice Shah said.

"The Varieties of Democracy project tells us that autocracies now outnumber democracies in the world for the first time in twenty years — 91 to 88. The global average level of democracy has receded to where it stood in 1985," he added.

"Freedom is in retreat, and those retreating are retreating faster than those advancing. This room — this symposium on legal empowerment and autocracy — is exactly where the counter-strategy must be built."

The former Supreme Court judge notes that the 26th and 27th constitutional amendments, though passed by a two-thirds parliamentary majority, amounted to the "destruction of the Constitution".

"Formally, they were constitutional acts. Substantively, they were the destruction of the Constitution. This is autocratic legalism at its most sophisticated: using the forms of democracy to hollow out its content," he said.

Justice Shah, outlining a roadmap for people, lawyers, judges, and institutions, suggests rebuilding legal education as a foundation for democratic education to counter autocracy.

"Law schools must stop producing technically excellent servants of power and start producing constitutionally grounded democratic citizens. That means political philosophy, constitutional history, the sociology of judicial capture — as core curriculum, not elective enrichment. And it means immersing future judges and lawyers in the cultural tradition of resistance: the poetry, the art, the music of those who refused. The lawyer who has never been moved by poetry will not be moved by a constitutional argument at two in the morning when staying silent is so much easier."