There is only one country in the world that Pakistan bars its citizens from visiting: Israel. What a coincidence then that today, both Pakistan and Israel are standing at similar crossroads in the trajectory of their governance systems, embattling their own constitutional crises. This is the beauty of politics; it unites friends and foes, political events weaving together national destinies and the future paths of countries.
Amid massive protests that saw tens of thousands of people on the streets this month over the proposed judicial reforms that aim to curb the independent Israeli Supreme Court’s power, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to delay his contested plans. Not fully giving up, he reckoned that ‘an extremist minority’ was carrying out the protests and paralyzing the country. Recent political showdown shows otherwise. The country’s largest union, public, diplomats, airports, ports, shopping malls, the medical association, banks, municipalities, and local councils carried out united protests in opposition to the proposed reforms believing that they were an attempt to erode the country’s democracy.
Netanyahu, who has served for a total of 15 years as Prime Minister and was elected again for the 6th time in December 2022, has pushed for provisions that would restrict the Supreme Court’s powers to rule against the legislature and the executive, thus, giving the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, the power to override decisions of the Supreme Court with a simple majority of 61 votes out of a total of the 120 seats in the Knesset. Another proposal would bar the Supreme Court from reviewing the legality of Israel’s Basic Laws, which in absence of a codified constitution, like the UK and New Zealand, serve as the country’s de jure constitution. Political pundits and public protestors alike fear what it would mean for Israeli politics in the absence of the strong checks and balances that the Supreme Court has continued to provide.
Furthermore, Netanyahu’s proposed reforms seek to alter the manner in which Supreme Court judges are selected, thereby providing politicians with unprecedented power in appointing judges. Currently, an independent panel of judges and politicians tends to agree on appointments. If the reforms are passed, they would give the Netanyahu-dominated Knesset de-facto control over judicial appointments—a politically preferable step for Netanyahu as he faces a corruption trial. Critics fear that the proposals would transform the Israeli political system into a more Hungarian style ‘illiberal democracy’ model, with Netanyahu enjoying unlimited control over all branches of the state.
Thousands of kilometres away, Pakistan paints a similar picture. On March 31st, Pakistan’s Parliament passed a new law to curb the powers of the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, unveiling the faultlines and fissures among all levers of government and the state’s institutions. The PDM minority government’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has engaged in a rather public row with the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice over the matter of holding snap elections in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, two provinces where former Prime Minister Imran Khan had dissolved the local assemblies earlier in the year in an attempt to force early general elections, as the country holds provincial and national elections together.
The legislation deemed the ‘Supreme Court (Practice and Procedure) Act, 2023, followed a suo motu notice taken by the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Umar Ata Bandial, of the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP) delaying of provincial elections in Punjab, which the government claimed was ‘judicial activism’ by the leader of the country’s apex court. The government demanded judicial non-interference in political affairs and suggested setting up a three-member panel headed by the Chief Justice to take up suo motu cases.
It cited security concerns and economic instability behind the delaying of the elections, despite the constitutional provision that elections must be held within 90 days of the dissolution of a legislative assembly. As the ECP failed to announce an election schedule, the President, Arif Alvi of Khan’s PTI announced April 9th as the poll date in the two provinces. Amid scrutiny over the legality of the announcement by the President, the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Umar Ata Bandial took a suo motu notice of the issue on February 23. Four judges from the original nine-judge bench then met to hear the issue and on March 1, in a 3-2 verdict, the Supreme Court ordered the ECP to announce an election schedule as per its constitutional obligations, which eventually led the government to pass the bill curbing the Supreme Court’s power, a litany of events that many have equated to a political dramedy.
As Pakistan faces perhaps its worst ever economic crisis, where stampedes claiming the lives of hungry people in search of subsidized food are becoming ever too prevalent, the IMF brokered deal is still in the works after months of delay, and the country’s inflation rate as of February 2023 has been 31.5%, the highest since June 1974, the squabbles and self-inflicted constitutional crisis seem nothing but an attempt by power-hungry and narrowly self-interested elites to distract the country from the actual, grave realities of the economic turmoil it is facing.
It is to be noted that while the legal fraternity has opined time and again that the discretionary powers of the Chief Justice of Pakistan need to be regulated, legal experts differ over whether this should be carried out via an act of Parliament of the amendment of the Supreme Court Rules, 1980. There is real concern that the Chief Justice’s unshackled discretionary powers to constitute benches, ‘fix’ cases and start public interest proceedings under Article 184 (3) of the Constitution as well as his discretionary powers as the Chairman of the Judicial Commission of Pakistan and the Supreme Judicial Council in the process of appointments and removals of judges under Article 209 of the constitution, have come too far and are seriously threatening the power of the legislative and executive branches of the government. However, the opportune timing of the bill by the government as Imran Khan demands elections, is not an attempt at judicial transformation, but rather a poorly designed political manoeuvre to stall the elections in Punjab and KPK which Khan is likely to win.
When Imran Khan was facing a vote of no confidence in April 2022, he tried very hard to keep his political nemeses out of power at the expense of violating the Constitution. At the time, the Supreme Court opened its doors close to midnight in a never-before seen fashion, took suo motu notice and stopped this gross violation.
Not once did the very people wielding the flags of democracy and judicial activism in the corridors of power today object to the manner and the procedural details of the suo motu action; all hailed the Supreme Court for acting to safeguard democracy when the suo motu went in their interests.
Today, as political expediency demands it, the PDM-led minority government, that doesn’t necessarily hold a full democratic mandate, is too focused on the minor foibles of the suo motu as the country is in doldrums. This writer is not a legal expert, but as a student of the social sciences, comprehends political dramedies well. Today, democracy stands threatened not by a nonsensical demagogue or dictator, but at the hands of its supposed ‘custodians’, a Prime Minister and his minority government standing in the way of general elections with a universal franchise.
And so, like the people of Israel who refused to be silent when democracy was being butchered, the Pakistani people should voice their protests over the convenient timing and misuse of the proposed bill to thwart an election. Pakistan can come out of a deluge of problems only when the democratic will of the people and the rule of law prevails. Any attempts at judicial turnaround are welcome, only when they are intended as such. Right now is not the time.
Amid massive protests that saw tens of thousands of people on the streets this month over the proposed judicial reforms that aim to curb the independent Israeli Supreme Court’s power, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to delay his contested plans. Not fully giving up, he reckoned that ‘an extremist minority’ was carrying out the protests and paralyzing the country. Recent political showdown shows otherwise. The country’s largest union, public, diplomats, airports, ports, shopping malls, the medical association, banks, municipalities, and local councils carried out united protests in opposition to the proposed reforms believing that they were an attempt to erode the country’s democracy.
Netanyahu, who has served for a total of 15 years as Prime Minister and was elected again for the 6th time in December 2022, has pushed for provisions that would restrict the Supreme Court’s powers to rule against the legislature and the executive, thus, giving the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, the power to override decisions of the Supreme Court with a simple majority of 61 votes out of a total of the 120 seats in the Knesset. Another proposal would bar the Supreme Court from reviewing the legality of Israel’s Basic Laws, which in absence of a codified constitution, like the UK and New Zealand, serve as the country’s de jure constitution. Political pundits and public protestors alike fear what it would mean for Israeli politics in the absence of the strong checks and balances that the Supreme Court has continued to provide.
Furthermore, Netanyahu’s proposed reforms seek to alter the manner in which Supreme Court judges are selected, thereby providing politicians with unprecedented power in appointing judges. Currently, an independent panel of judges and politicians tends to agree on appointments. If the reforms are passed, they would give the Netanyahu-dominated Knesset de-facto control over judicial appointments—a politically preferable step for Netanyahu as he faces a corruption trial. Critics fear that the proposals would transform the Israeli political system into a more Hungarian style ‘illiberal democracy’ model, with Netanyahu enjoying unlimited control over all branches of the state.
As Pakistan faces perhaps its worst ever economic crisis, where stampedes claiming the lives of hungry people in search of subsidized food are becoming ever too prevalent, the IMF brokered deal is still in the works after months of delay, and the country’s inflation rate as of February 2023 has been 31.5%, the highest since June 1974, the squabbles and self-inflicted constitutional crisis seem nothing but an attempt by power-hungry and narrowly self-interested elites to distract the country from the actual, grave realities of the economic turmoil it is facing.
Thousands of kilometres away, Pakistan paints a similar picture. On March 31st, Pakistan’s Parliament passed a new law to curb the powers of the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, unveiling the faultlines and fissures among all levers of government and the state’s institutions. The PDM minority government’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has engaged in a rather public row with the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice over the matter of holding snap elections in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, two provinces where former Prime Minister Imran Khan had dissolved the local assemblies earlier in the year in an attempt to force early general elections, as the country holds provincial and national elections together.
The legislation deemed the ‘Supreme Court (Practice and Procedure) Act, 2023, followed a suo motu notice taken by the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Umar Ata Bandial, of the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP) delaying of provincial elections in Punjab, which the government claimed was ‘judicial activism’ by the leader of the country’s apex court. The government demanded judicial non-interference in political affairs and suggested setting up a three-member panel headed by the Chief Justice to take up suo motu cases.
It cited security concerns and economic instability behind the delaying of the elections, despite the constitutional provision that elections must be held within 90 days of the dissolution of a legislative assembly. As the ECP failed to announce an election schedule, the President, Arif Alvi of Khan’s PTI announced April 9th as the poll date in the two provinces. Amid scrutiny over the legality of the announcement by the President, the Chief Justice of Pakistan, Umar Ata Bandial took a suo motu notice of the issue on February 23. Four judges from the original nine-judge bench then met to hear the issue and on March 1, in a 3-2 verdict, the Supreme Court ordered the ECP to announce an election schedule as per its constitutional obligations, which eventually led the government to pass the bill curbing the Supreme Court’s power, a litany of events that many have equated to a political dramedy.
As Pakistan faces perhaps its worst ever economic crisis, where stampedes claiming the lives of hungry people in search of subsidized food are becoming ever too prevalent, the IMF brokered deal is still in the works after months of delay, and the country’s inflation rate as of February 2023 has been 31.5%, the highest since June 1974, the squabbles and self-inflicted constitutional crisis seem nothing but an attempt by power-hungry and narrowly self-interested elites to distract the country from the actual, grave realities of the economic turmoil it is facing.
It is to be noted that while the legal fraternity has opined time and again that the discretionary powers of the Chief Justice of Pakistan need to be regulated, legal experts differ over whether this should be carried out via an act of Parliament of the amendment of the Supreme Court Rules, 1980. There is real concern that the Chief Justice’s unshackled discretionary powers to constitute benches, ‘fix’ cases and start public interest proceedings under Article 184 (3) of the Constitution as well as his discretionary powers as the Chairman of the Judicial Commission of Pakistan and the Supreme Judicial Council in the process of appointments and removals of judges under Article 209 of the constitution, have come too far and are seriously threatening the power of the legislative and executive branches of the government. However, the opportune timing of the bill by the government as Imran Khan demands elections, is not an attempt at judicial transformation, but rather a poorly designed political manoeuvre to stall the elections in Punjab and KPK which Khan is likely to win.
When Imran Khan was facing a vote of no confidence in April 2022, he tried very hard to keep his political nemeses out of power at the expense of violating the Constitution. At the time, the Supreme Court opened its doors close to midnight in a never-before seen fashion, took suo motu notice and stopped this gross violation.
Not once did the very people wielding the flags of democracy and judicial activism in the corridors of power today object to the manner and the procedural details of the suo motu action; all hailed the Supreme Court for acting to safeguard democracy when the suo motu went in their interests.
Today, as political expediency demands it, the PDM-led minority government, that doesn’t necessarily hold a full democratic mandate, is too focused on the minor foibles of the suo motu as the country is in doldrums. This writer is not a legal expert, but as a student of the social sciences, comprehends political dramedies well. Today, democracy stands threatened not by a nonsensical demagogue or dictator, but at the hands of its supposed ‘custodians’, a Prime Minister and his minority government standing in the way of general elections with a universal franchise.
And so, like the people of Israel who refused to be silent when democracy was being butchered, the Pakistani people should voice their protests over the convenient timing and misuse of the proposed bill to thwart an election. Pakistan can come out of a deluge of problems only when the democratic will of the people and the rule of law prevails. Any attempts at judicial turnaround are welcome, only when they are intended as such. Right now is not the time.