By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: A Supreme Court justice has issued a stark warning to the country’s chief justice, urging the convening of a judicial conference to address threats to the independence of the courts, while decrying the judiciary’s historical role as a tool wielded by unelected elites to thwart the will of the people.
The letter from Justice Athar Minallah to Chief Justice Yahya Afridi emerges at a moment of heightened tension, as the government pushes forward with the 27th Constitutional Amendment. The bill, already approved by the Senate, proposes significant alterations to several articles, primarily those concerning the judiciary and military leadership.
Justice Minallah framed the document as a fulfilment of his solemn duty to the Constitution, intended to record for future generations how their fate was being decided behind the marble walls of the nation’s highest court. He wrote that the letter was prompted by recent events that had severely undermined public confidence in the judiciary. “Institutions are not built overnight, but they can be destroyed in no time through fear, surrender or submission to the powers,” Justice Minallah stated. “The history of our judiciary is not unblemished nor flattering. However, its past failings, no matter how grave, cannot justify its continued capture to serve the interests of the unelected elites.”
As a sitting judge on the Supreme Court, he expressed a profound sense of obligation to voice his alarm over the dwindling trust in the institution. “I had taken an oath to defend, protect, and preserve the Constitution, but find myself helpless because the fundamental rights covenanted to the people have too often been reduced to mere cliché or rhetoric,” he wrote. “We may pretend otherwise, but the stark reality is unpleasant and embarrassing for me as a judge of the highest Court and as a guardian of the Constitution.”
Justice Minallah argued that the truth had been hidden from the public for far too long, with citizens misled and exploited to maintain elite control. “From the very inception of our independence, the history of the state has been marred by the unholy alliance between certain state institutions and entrenched elites,” he said. “An alliance having the hallmark of control, privilege, and impunity. The SC, by design or omission, has too often been employed as an instrument to suppress the will of the people rather than to safeguard it.”
He contended that judicial precedents had frequently yielded to raw power rather than aligning with the populace. He pointed to the ouster and execution of former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto as “one of the gravest and most unpardonable betrayal of our oath and of the people’s trust.” The justice drew parallels to subsequent episodes, including the persecution of Benazir Bhutto by unelected elements within state institutions, and the disqualification and harassment of Nawaz Sharif and his daughter, describing these as “a continuation of a pattern of suppression of the people’s will when the interests of the unelected elite were threatened.”
He noted that President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had similarly been ensnared in this cycle. “The phenomenon represents a consistent pattern of elite manipulation, wherein leaders are fostered and then ruined,” Justice Minallah wrote. “Once they are backed by the people’s mandate, they are systemically dismantled if and when they challenge the entrenched power. The will of the people has repeatedly been subverted to perpetuate the elite capture of the state; a betrayal and subversion that strikes at the very heart of constitutional democracy.”
Extending the critique to the present, he asserted that Imran Khan, the founder of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, was enduring the same pattern of victimisation. “Political dissent has been criminalised, those who refuse to bend, including women, are made to endure inhuman conditions,” he said. “It is no longer a secret that justice is denied to them.” “The truth is known to us, but it is whispered only in the tea room and chambers of this Court,” Justice Minallah added tearoom independence of this institution has too often been compromised from within, whether through surrender or through active participation.”
He lamented the judiciary’s silence on grave matters, including when a former chief justice disclosed that enforced disappearances had affected his own family, and when another chief justice, in the context of a case on reserved seats, cautioned 12 judges that he had prevented martial law and that external forces “would come and send us home.” Under the Supreme Court’s oversight, Justice Minallah charged, elections had been rigged, popular mandates stifled, dissent muzzled, political loyalties criminalised, and journalists kidnapped or coerced.
At this pivotal moment, he said, self-examination was imperative. “I would respectfully urge that a judicial conference be convened for having an open institutional dialogue with all judges of the SC and the high courts to consider threats to independence of the judiciary that may be jeopardising its constitutional function of acting as a machinery for enforcement of fundamental rights of citizens,” he proposed. “A candid and open discussion on the state of our institution, the challenges to its independence, and the steps necessary to reclaim the people’s trust has become inevitable,” he continued. “The judiciary is at a perilous crossroads. The truth must be spoken at this moment of reckoning.”
Justice Minallah suggested that Parliament might benefit from the judiciary’s collective views, as expressed in such a conference, before proceeding with amendments to the foundational law. He cited media reports indicating that preparations were afoot to locate the proposed Federal Constitutional Court within the Federal Shariat Court’s premises. “What is the invisible process through which some within the judiciary have been made aware of the changes that are to proposed through a Constitutional amendment?” he questioned. “And what explains their eagerness to make advance administrative arrangements to accommodate the proposed structure of the judiciary even prior to the Parliament considering it?”
In closing, he emphasised that the judiciary’s primary fidelity must be to the people and the Constitution, not to its own perpetuation or subservience to authority. “This court and the judiciary as an institution are at a perilous crossroad and silence in the face of the systemic erosion of judicial independence would only amount to complicity,” Justice Minallah wrote. “Our oath compels us to speak and uphold the truth and to guard the Constitution even when it is inconvenient to do so.”
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