Eighteen years after the lawyers’ movement, when three friends and colleagues, bound by a shared belief in the Constitution, were tested once more, only two remained true to that promise.
One of the most striking moments in A Man for All Seasons comes when Thomas More debates his hot-headed son-in-law, Roper, who insists that the law should be swept aside to catch the “devil”, meaning anyone dangerous or politically threatening. More responds with a powerful image: England is planted thick with laws, “like a forest”, and those laws protect everyone, even the people we despise.
Then More asks a piercing question: if you cut down every law to hunt your enemies, what will protect you when power turns and comes for you? Without the law, More warns, you will be standing in an open field with the winds blowing from every direction, completely defenceless.
This scene captures the core of the play: the rule of law is not a tool for the powerful but a shield for everyone, and once it is weakened for expedience, no one can control what comes next.
Yesterday, Pakistan lost two of its most brilliant jurists — Justices Syed Mansoor Ali Shah and Athar Minallah. Why that happened remains for history to answer. But their story did not begin yesterday. It began decades ago, in 1997, when three friends, united by a shared belief in the Constitution, established one of the most progressive law firms of the time: Afridi, Shah & Minallah. They had little more than their intellect, their conviction, and an unshakable refusal to compromise principle for power.
A decade later, that promise was tested. They stood by their principles, boycotting the Dogar court and taking to the streets as part of the nationwide lawyers’ movement to reinstate Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. Their courage was quiet, steadfast, and unwavering. The Dogar court fell. The Chaudhry court resumed. What happened within those walls is a discussion for another day.
Justice Shah: a bench of reform
Justice Shah was elevated to the Lahore High Court in 2009, following a distinguished legal career spanning tax, corporate, and numerous public interest cases, particularly in environmental protection and sustainable development. Elevation had never been on his radar, but a few persuaded him that the bench would give him a platform to interpret the law, expand rights, transform social order, and uphold the rule of law.
And he did all that, and more.
At the Lahore High Court, Justice Shah authored some of the most progressive judgments across elections, democracy, disability, gender, climate, technology, court delays, local government, and more. Known as the “green judge”, he led the Green Bench to hear climate and environmental disputes.
Related: Rulers little concerned about ordinary citizens: Justice Mansoor Ali Shah
A judicial reformist, he established Alternate Dispute Resolution Centres in Punjab to reduce chronic case backlogs, set up Criminal and Civil Model Courts to improve coordination and expedite justice, and introduced the Case Management and Court Automation Systems.
With the Punjab Information Technology Board, he implemented the first Enterprise IT System to make the judicial system open, transparent, and fully connected for the decade ahead.
Justice Minallah: courage in the capital
In 2014, Shah was joined by his friend and former law firm partner, Athar Minallah, who rose to the bench at the Islamabad High Court, where a clear strand of judicial courage emerged.
Justice Minallah confronted enforced disappearances, extra-judicial killings, illegal land acquisitions, animal rights violations, and defended society’s most vulnerable. When the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act 2016 was weaponised to stifle dissent, he declared it unconstitutional.
He also made exemplary judicial appointments, including several judges who repeatedly stood firm to principle despite intense executive pressure.
Related: Talk of ‘hybrid system’ is admission of dictatorship: Justice Minallah
The purpose of this piece is not to catalogue every judicial achievement. Even their critics must acknowledge the creativity, constitutional insight, and hundreds of judgments they authored, which enriched Pakistan’s jurisprudence domestically and internationally. They carried this par excellence with grace and grit at the Supreme Court, and their impact continues to resonate.
One may disagree with many of their lordships’ judgments, but like everyone else, they are human.
As Justice Minallah recently reminded in a letter, “Barring a few exceptions, all of us, myself included, have erred or fallen short of the ideals we are sworn to uphold. We are, after all, fallible human beings.”
The Qazi court
Much of what we have witnessed over the past two years is the story of how one judicial era and its successor inflicted extraordinary damage on the Constitution. The Qazi court set the stage. Whatever remained intact after that was not undone; it was taken to an entirely new level by the court that followed, a level defined by autocratic legalism.
During this period, Pakistan’s largest political party, the PTI, was stripped of its electoral symbol on the eve of the 2024 general elections. The court declined to clarify PTI’s legal status, forcing its candidates to contest as independents. When the majority of those independents managed to clinch victory despite the several hurdles placed in their way, their democratic mandate was quietly denied. When PTI-backed independents joined another entity to claim reserved seats, the Election Commission of Pakistan denied them their constitutional entitlement. The Peshawar High Court upheld this denial.
The matter then reached the Supreme Court, where a three-member bench led by Justice Shah, and joined by Justice Minallah, granted leave, suspended the PHC judgment, and directed the formation of a larger bench. By an 8–5 majority, the full court, in an opinion authored by Justice Shah and joined by Justice Minallah, held what had been obvious: “PTI was and is a political party.”
Related: The Qazi to end all qazis
The judgment reaffirmed a fundamental principle of electoral democracy: “When the Election Commission errs or makes significant mistakes impacting the electoral process, judicial intervention becomes necessary to rectify them and ensure electoral justice. The judiciary, tasked with ensuring electoral justice, must foremost preserve the will of the people.”
Even this was not enough. The principle of the “Master of the Roster”, which Justice Isa himself had previously critiqued, was restored, now manipulated to serve his own whims. The Supreme Court Practice and Procedure Committee was reshuffled to engineer bench composition. Judges were handpicked, verdicts overturned, and the path cleared for the 26th Amendment, designed to prevent a single individual from ever becoming chief justice. History will not forget this episode: it is truly one for the books.
Yet the will of the people was never delivered. Not then, not later, not to this day. The same court, aided by two dissents, opened the door for the Election Commission to ignore the verdict.
So, where did the Qazi court lead us?
A Constitution left adrift, civil freedoms suspended, executive capture entrenched, and judicial independence in tatters. On his last day in office, both Justice Shah and Justice Minallah refused to attend the chief justice’s reference.
Justice Shah described him as “an ostrich with its head in the sand, complacent and indifferent to external influences and pressures on the judiciary”. Even when courageous judges confronted interference in their work, the chief justice publicly insisted there was “no external influence in the judiciary”.
Justice for those judges was not served, and it is still not served.
The loyal court and the path to the 27th Amendment
The Qazi court had already undermined the very foundation of the Constitution. Its successor, with a handpicked chief justice, completed that destruction. Military courts were legalised, verdicts restoring the will of the people were overturned, and challenges to the 26th Amendment were ignored.
In the reserved seats verdict, Justice Shah reminded us, “We must remember that Constitutions are not ephemeral enactments, designed to meet passing situations but are designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it.”
Today, Parliament has bulldozed through a constitutional amendment that fundamentally alters the balance of power between the judiciary and the executive. The amendment establishes a Federal Constitutional Court, effectively a Federally Controlled Court (FCC), a parallel judicial structure that strips the Supreme Court of Pakistan of its defining role: interpreting the Constitution.
Under this amendment, the president and prime minister appoint the FCC’s chief justice and initial judges, bypassing the Judicial Commission of Pakistan and embedding executive influence from the outset. Until legislation determines its composition, the executive alone decides the number of judges. Their preferred nominee has already been identified: the same judge who instructed the election commission to disregard a binding Supreme Court decision.
Almost every civil or criminal case involves a constitutional question, yet litigants must now navigate a maze between the FCC and the Supreme Court. Cases will ricochet; justice will become slower, costlier, and less certain; ordinary citizens seeking refuge from power will have no clear path.
Related: 27th Amendment: The end of an era
History is rarely kind to regimes that attempt permanence through constitutional engineering. Their projects always collapse, but only after inflicting deep wounds on institutions meant to protect citizens. Pakistan has seen this cycle before.
In his additional note in the Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Reference, Justice Yahya Afridi warned that “the extraordinary political climate of the time and the pressures inherent in such an environment appear to have influenced the course of justice in a manner inconsistent with the ideals of judicial independence”. He paid tribute to Justices Dorab Patel, Muhammad Haleem, and G. Safdar Shah, judges who stood firm in moments of darkness, even when their dissents could not change the outcome.
But when history presented him with the same test, the chief justice appears to have chosen accommodation over conviction. The 27th Amendment was bulldozed through, and he did not resist the dismantling of the judiciary. What he diagnosed in words, he failed to defend in practice. In the end, others saw him as more concerned with retaining his title than safeguarding the institution — serving as chief justice of a broken, toothless Supreme Court stripped of its constitutional soul.
Reckoning and responsibility
The damage will haunt the country for years. Like all assaults on constitutionalism, this too will eventually be undone, but we cannot leave that reckoning to time. The moment demands clarity, courage, and memory.
The judges who take oath in an illegitimate, federally controlled court will be nothing but collaborators; those who accepted extensions and titles in exchange for conscience have betrayed the very principles they swore to uphold. Now is the time to act. This responsibility is not limited to them; it extends to each of us who believes in the supremacy of the Constitution, and in courage and judicial independence.
Eighteen years after the lawyers’ movement, when three friends and colleagues, bound by a shared belief in the Constitution, were tested once more, only two remained true to that promise. Shah and Minallah still stood firm, courageous, and unbowed.
And so the story returns to where it began: the law, when defended with intellect, conviction, and courage, remains the forest in which justice grows, shielding all, even those we may despise, from the unpredictable winds of power.
Thank you, Shah and Minallah. History will neither forget nor forgive.
The author is a law student at Yale Law School. He previously clerked for Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah at the Supreme Court of Pakistan.