Authoritarianism, Judicial Independence, and the Struggle to Reclaim Democracy
Justice (R) Syed Mansoor Ali Shah
Distinguished Chair in Constitutionalism & Justice, LUMS
Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fellow, Yale Law School 2026
Former Senior Puisne Judge, Supreme Court of Pakistan
Keynote Address · 2026
Bernstein Symposium
Schell Center for International Human Rights · Yale Law School
Sterling Memorial Library · New Haven, CT ·
April 10, 2026
OPENING: THE VOICE OF THE SOUTH, THE CRISIS OF THE NORTH
Dean Rodríguez, Professors Flores and Kahn, and distinguished colleagues —
I come to this podium as a voice from the Global South. But the crisis I am here to describe does not respect that geography. The Global North—whose democracies were once held up as the standard to which the South should aspire—is itself in crisis. The United States has, for the first time in over fifty years, lost its classification as a liberal democracy in the Varieties of Democracy project’s 2026 assessment. The country that wrote the most influential democratic constitution in history is currently classified, by the most rigorous measures available, as an electoral democracy—the same category as states whose democratic credentials have always been contested. This is not a partisan observation. It is a measurement. And it changes the nature of this conversation fundamentally.
This morning you examined the United Nations human rights system under strain. This afternoon you will examine regional human rights mechanisms under pressure. I have been asked to stand between those two conversations, and I want to offer a unifying argument: the same governments that dismantle domestic courts through constitutional engineering, suppress civil society through arrests and bullets, co-opt bar associations with land grants and judicial appointments, and silence the press through ownership and threat—are the same governments that send coordinated delegations to Geneva to water down resolutions, block Special Procedures, and turn the Universal Periodic Review into theatre. The erosion of rights at home is paired with an attempt to blind the referees abroad. The assault on every level of the accountability architecture is coordinated. The defence must be equally coordinated.
I speak 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 stripped of the authority to protect it. I will speak from testimony. But I begin with the global picture, because Pakistan is not an exception. It is a case study in a pattern—and the pattern is accelerating.
- THE AUTHORITARIAN RESURGENCE
Authoritarianism is not a single thing. It has a spectrum, and the sophistication of the twenty-first century lies in how much of that spectrum now operates behind the façade of democratic form.
At one end are the closed autocracies—China, Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Belarus—where political competition is structurally eliminated. Constitutions, courts, legislatures, and the press exist as instruments of the ruler’s will rather than constraints upon it.
Then there are the electoral autocracies—the defining political form of our era. These states hold elections, maintain constitutional structures, operate courts and parliaments, and produce the full vocabulary of democratic governance, while systematically hollowing out everything that makes democracy real. Electoral autocracy is the defining political innovation of the twenty-first century. It exploits the imprecision in our understanding of democracy and weaponises our tolerance for its forms.
Hungary under Orbán is the European paradigm. Elected by a genuine majority, he has constitutionalised an illiberal agenda: packing the Constitutional Court, capturing the media, redrawing electoral boundaries, amending the constitution to entrench his advantages—ensuring that even when the opposition wins more votes, the rotation of power becomes structurally impossible.
Turkey deserves particular attention as a textbook case of judicial capture. When the 2016 coup attempt provided political cover, the government used emergency decrees to purge over four thousand judges and prosecutors overnight—without judicial review, without due process, without appeal. The 2017 constitutional referendum abolished the office of Prime Minister and concentrated executive power in the presidency. Today, twelve of the fifteen members of Turkey’s Constitutional Court are appointed directly or indirectly by the President. Turkey’s journey from European Union accession candidate to electoral autocracy took barely a decade.
And then there are the cases that most trouble the global conversation, because they come from within the circle of established democracies.
India, the world’s largest democracy by population, has been formally reclassified as an electoral autocracy. The Citizenship Amendment Act structurally excluded Muslims from its protections. The revocation of Article 370 in Kashmir dismantled constitutionally protected autonomy without the consent of the people concerned. State investigative agencies have been deployed against opposition leaders and journalists with systematic intensity. The Supreme Court, with rare exceptions, has produced validation rather than review.
Israel attempted, in 2023, a judicial overhaul that would have given the government power to override Supreme Court decisions by simple parliamentary majority. The Supreme Court’s resistance was a genuine democratic achievement. But the same Israel has maintained a military occupation for over fifty years in which millions of people live under military law with no political rights. A democracy that reserves rights selectively—by ethnicity, by religion, by geography—is a democracy for some, administered by power over others.
And the United States. The 2026 V-Dem report describes the United States as undergoing the fastest evolving episode of autocratisation in modern history. The administration introduced Schedule Policy/Career—the renamed Schedule F—reclassifying approximately fifty thousand career civil servants as at-will employees, dismissible for political non-conformity. Independent agencies have been dismantled. Universities and cultural institutions have been defunded as retribution for critical thought. The press has been named an enemy of the people. Congress, dominated by the President’s own party, has largely declined its oversight function.
When the United States, India, and Israel—the three governments most vocally committed to the language of democratic values in international forums—present this face to the world, it is no wonder that the argument for democracy struggles to be heard in the places where it matters most.
- THE ANATOMY OF AUTHORITARIANISM
Across the entire spectrum, a set of structural features recurs with remarkable consistency.
The first is the concentration of power in a single person or a tight inner circle. Democratic constitutions distribute power precisely to prevent its abuse. Authoritarianism systematically reverses this design.
The second is the capture of institutions. Authoritarianism does not abolish the judiciary, the press, or the legislature. It captures them—replacing independent leadership with loyal figures, adjusting mandates through legislation or constitutional amendment, ensuring that formal independence masks substantive subordination. The court still sits. The parliament still votes. The newspaper still publishes. But the court validates, the parliament endorses, and the newspaper amplifies whatever the executive requires. This institutional mimicry is the defining technological achievement of twenty-first-century authoritarianism.
The third is the patronage network—organised elitism. Authoritarianism does not merely concentrate political power. It concentrates social power, building elite networks of patronage, privilege, and preferential access that penetrate every layer of society. Connection matters more than merit, proximity to power more than principle. It seeps downward from palace to police station, from ministry to magistrate’s court. It produces an entire social architecture in which inequality is constitutionalised.
The fourth is the suppression of dissent through the systematic escalation of cost. First the legal tools—sedition laws, anti-terrorism legislation, cybercrime laws criminalising online dissent. Then the financial tools—tax investigations, licence revocations, foreign funding restrictions. Then the physical tools—arrests, disappearances, killings. The objective is not to eliminate dissent entirely but to raise its cost high enough that most people make the rational calculation that silence is safer.
The fifth is the promise. Authoritarianism presents itself as the solution to democracy’s failures: stability where there was chaos, efficiency where there was gridlock, transformation where there was stagnation. But this rests on a fundamental deception. An autocracy is, by its very construction, incapable of delivering the prosperity and justice it promises—not as a matter of empirical record but of structural logic. A system that eliminates accountability cannot, over time, be fair. A system that destroys information cannot, over time, be efficient. A system that entrenches privilege cannot, over time, be just. These are not failures of implementation. They are consequences of design.
To this anatomy, the twenty-first century has added its newest and most powerful instrument: the weaponisation of digital technology. AI-powered surveillance, bot armies that flood the information commons with manufactured consensus, deepfakes that fabricate evidence of opposition leaders confessing to treason, algorithmic disinformation customised to individual psychological profiles. Global internet freedom has declined for fifteen consecutive years. When the information commons is colonised by algorithmic manipulation, the epistemic foundation that democracy requires is destroyed not by a single act of censorship but by a thousand daily degradations of truth.
III. THE GLOBAL PATTERN
The numbers are stark and moving in the wrong direction. The Varieties of Democracy project’s 2026 report identifies ninety-two autocratic regimes against eighty-seven democracies—of which only twenty-seven meet the criteria for liberal democracy, accounting for a mere seven percent of the global population. The global average level of democracy has receded to where it stood in 1985. Freedom House reports that 2025 marked the twentieth consecutive year in which the number of countries registering democratic decline exceeded those registering democratic progress.
Between the liberal democracy and the closed autocracy sits the category that most demands analytical precision: the hybrid regime. These are states in which elections occur and constitutional structures are maintained, while the substantive conditions for genuine accountability are systematically absent. V-Dem identifies sixty electoral autocracies worldwide—the largest single category of political system on earth.
The critical danger is treating the hybrid regime as a stable equilibrium. It is not. It is a snapshot of a trajectory. Hungary was a hybrid regime in 2014; by 2022 it had consolidated into competitive authoritarianism. Turkey was a hybrid regime in 2013; by 2018 it had completed the transition. When we classify a state as hybrid, we must simultaneously ask: in which direction is it moving, and at what speed?
Pakistan is a hybrid in active transition toward autocracy, and the constitutional engineering of 2024 and 2025 is the mechanism of that tipping. The Constitution of Pakistan, as originally framed, did not contemplate, sanction, or accommodate a hybrid regime. Article 245 limits the role of the armed forces to acting in aid of civil power. The hybrid reality arose from constitutional failure. The Twenty-Sixth and Twenty-Seventh Amendments did not merely continue this failure. They institutionalised it—converting the informal dominance of the military-executive nexus into formal constitutional architecture.
- THE JUDICIAL PLAYBOOK: AUTOCRATIC LEGALISM IN PRACTICE
Against this global backdrop, let me describe the specific playbook by which authoritarian governments capture courts—and then speak to it from personal testimony.
Kim Lane Scheppele identified the essential insight: modern authoritarians do not need to stage coups. They achieve the elimination of meaningful constitutional constraint through formally legal procedures. The law becomes not a constraint on power but an instrument of it. The playbook is consistent: control judicial appointments; strip jurisdiction from courts that resist; constitutionalise the changes to make them irreversible.
In Hungary: parliamentary supermajority used to expand the Constitutional Court from eleven to fifteen members, immediately filling new seats with loyalists; constitutionalising the electoral boundaries that produced the supermajority. In Turkey: four thousand judges purged by emergency decree overnight in 2016; constitutional referendum the following year abolishing the separation of powers. In Poland: constitutional crisis over judicial appointments that the Tusk government, elected in 2023, is still struggling to resolve, because the Law and Justice party embedded its judicial changes in constitutional provisions before losing power. In El Salvador: Bukele dismissed the Supreme Court justices who had limited his emergency powers and replaced them with loyalists within hours. The script is the same. Only the national details change.
Now Pakistan.
When I took oath as a Judge of the Lahore High Court in 2009, I joined a constitutional court. My devotion to constitutionalism and my faith in the transformative power of the Constitution guided every day of my judicial life. That was the calling. That was the institution I chose.
In 2024, the Supreme Court of Pakistan delivered judgment in the Sunni Ittehad Council case. The February 2024 elections had produced a large number of independent candidates affiliated with the opposition. The Court found, by majority, that they were entitled to the reserved seats allocated to parliamentary parties—a result that would have deprived the ruling coalition of its two-thirds constitutional majority. The government refused to implement the judgment. And then it moved to ensure that no such judgment could ever be given again.
The Twenty-Sixth Constitutional Amendment, passed in October 2024, restructured the Judicial Commission of Pakistan—reducing judicial members and increasing political and executive representation to a majority of eight of thirteen. Most significantly, it ended the seniority-based appointment of the Chief Justice, instead empowering a twelve-member parliamentary committee to select from among the three most senior judges. No criteria were prescribed. No reasons were required.
The panel of three changes what a judge must be to become Chief Justice. Under the seniority convention, a judge had no incentive to cultivate executive favour—the position was determined by an objective rule. The panel converts the Chief Justiceship into a competition. The Committee will favour the candidate least likely to cause institutional discomfort—whose record suggests accommodation rather than independence, whose jurisprudence signals cooperation rather than resistance. This creates a backward incentive that shapes judicial behaviour years before the moment of appointment.
I was the senior-most judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. Under the seniority convention, I would have been appointed Chief Justice. Under the panel of three, I was submitted to the Parliamentary Committee alongside the two judges next senior to me. The Committee passed over me, passed over the judge next senior to me, and appointed the third. No reasons were given. None were required. The message required no decoding. The path to the Chief Justiceship runs through political alignment. This is not a side effect of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. It is its purpose.
I chose to stay—because there remained a sliver of hope that the Supreme Court would, as a Full Court, rise to examine the Amendment and reclaim its constitutional role. What extinguished that hope was not the legislation alone. At a moment when the dignity of the Court demanded principled resistance, the incumbent Chief Justice offered none. He assented to the amendment and negotiated only the preservation of his own position and title. My colleagues’ silence was its own verdict. No collective statement. No refusal. No act of professional solidarity.
The Twenty-Seventh Constitutional Amendment came in November 2025 and completed the dismantlement. It created above the Supreme Court a new Federal Constitutional Court composed of judges curated under the new executive-controlled appointment process. The Supreme Court that remained was stripped of constitutional jurisdiction, reduced to an appellate shell. The amendment introduced the power to transfer High Court judges across provinces without their consent—a mechanism for purging independent jurists. And in a provision of extraordinary audacity, it amended Articles 243(9) and 248 to grant absolute lifetime immunity from all civil and criminal proceedings to the heads of the three military branches and any officer holding the rank of Field Marshal—a provision that directly benefited the Chief of Army Staff who had been promoted to Field Marshal in May 2025, six months before the amendment was passed. The alignment of military promotion, constitutional amendment, and absolute judicial immunity is not a sequence that requires elaborate interpretation.
The light of judicial independence has not faded by accident. It has been dimmed by design.
- THE DEEPEST CUT: MANUFACTURING A COURT TO ERASE THE LAW
Of everything in this sequence, what I want to name most precisely for this room—a room of constitutional lawyers and human rights scholars—is the dimension that has received the least public attention and will cause the most durable damage.
The Twenty-Seventh Amendment did not merely strip the Supreme Court of constitutional jurisdiction. It created above it a new Federal Constitutional Court, composed of judges curated under the executive-controlled appointment process, and equipped that court with the power to disclaim seventy-eight years of Supreme Court jurisprudence as merely persuasive. The FCC has already exercised that power. In its early decisions, it has declared that Supreme Court precedents—the entire accumulated body of constitutional adjudication from independence to the present—do not bind it. It may follow them. It may not. The choice is the FCC’s alone, unreviewable, unreasoned, made by two judges whose appointments were controlled by the government whose constitutional amendments the court was designed to insulate from challenge.
Jurisprudence is not a collection of outcomes. It is the accumulated reasoning of a legal order: the record of how a society has answered, across decades and across thousands of contested cases, its hardest constitutional questions. What does liberty mean when the state claims emergency? What does equality require when the constitution is silent on a specific form of discrimination? Where does executive authority end and judicial review begin? Each judgment adds to this record. Each dissent marks the road not taken and keeps it available for the future. That requirement of engagement is what transforms a legal order from a series of unconnected commands into a living constitutional conversation—a dialogue conducted across time, binding the judge who decides today to the judge who decided thirty years ago and to the judge who will decide thirty years hence.
Every nation has a memory. Its judicial memory—how it has resolved its most contested questions under law—is held in its jurisprudence. To declare that memory non-binding is to begin the work of erasure.
This is autocratic legalism at its most architecturally sophisticated. The coup that abrogates the constitution overnight leaves the constitution behind as evidence of what existed before and what must be restored. The amendment that manufactures a new court, strips the existing court of jurisdiction, and equips the new court with the power to selectively disclaim the accumulated jurisprudence of its predecessor is harder to name, harder to reverse, and more durable in its damage. It does not tear down the building. It replaces the foundations with sand while the structure above still stands.
This is how jurisprudence dies—not with the drama of a coup, but with the quiet administrative authority of a two-member bench. Memory, once declared non-binding, does not disappear immediately. It fades. Lawyers stop citing it because they cannot be certain of its status. Judges stop engaging with it because engagement implies a relationship the new framework has severed. Law students cease to study it as living authority. That is not reform. That is amnesia by design.
But amnesia is not inevitable. Memory that is institutional can be captured. Memory that is distributed cannot. I propose, as a direct response to the FCC’s claim, the construction of an Independent Jurisprudential Archive—hosted jointly by the academy and the organised bar, governed by an independent board, mirrored across geographical jurisdictions, and structurally incapable of being captured by any single actor. Institutional memory preserved outside the institutions the state controls is the structural insurance policy against erasure. It is also the first concrete instrument of what I will come to later in this address: the Global Republic of Letters.
- WHY JUDGES GIVE IN
Why did most of my colleagues stay silent? The scholarship provides a rigorous account of why judicial systems fail under authoritarian pressure, and I want to work through it.
Fear is the first driver. Judges who refuse to validate a coup or resist a constitutional amendment face dismissal, detention, the destruction of a professional life built over decades. In Colombia, M-19 guerrillas seized the Palace of Justice in 1985, killing eleven Supreme Court justices. In Uganda, Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka was abducted and killed by soldiers in 1972. In El Salvador, judges who investigated death squad killings fled into exile.
Comfort is the second, and the most prevalent and least discussed. Much of judicial accommodation is not about survival under duress. It is about comfort: the position, the title, the salary, the official car, the deference of the courtroom. A judge who validates an authoritarian amendment does not typically do so in terror. He does so in a quiet office, with time to think, assisted by lawyers who can construct any rationale required.
Isolation is the third. A judge without institutional support—without security of tenure, without a professional community willing to defend her, without an audience that values her independence—faces the full weight of state power alone.
Institutionalised apoliticism, identified by Lisa Hilbink in her study of Chilean judges under Pinochet, is the fourth and most disturbing, because it operates without external pressure. The judges she studied were not coerced and were not sympathetic to Pinochet. They collaborated because their professional culture defined resistance as a violation of judicial propriety. The colonial common law tradition—built to administer, not to govern; to apply, not to scrutinise—produced exactly this culture across South Asia.
But I want to push back on Hilbink’s theory in its application to the contemporary crisis, because it contains a flaw that becomes critical when constitutions themselves become instruments of autocracy. The apoliticism defence holds that judges should apply the law as they find it and leave policy choices to the democratically accountable branches. In ordinary times, in functioning democracies, this has merit. But what happens when the law—including the constitutional text—has been weaponised against the fundamental rights it was designed to protect?
A judge who hides behind institutional apoliticism when a constitutional amendment strips an entire community of its rights, abolishes the independence of the judiciary, or grants lifetime immunity to military officers—is not being apolitical. She is making a deeply political choice in favour of power. There is no neutral ground when the constitution itself has been amended to produce injustice. The doctrine of apoliticism does not provide a refuge. It provides a rationalisation for complicity.
The answer is the basic structure doctrine, articulated by India’s Supreme Court in Kesavananda Bharati in 1973. Certain fundamental features of a constitution are beyond the amending power of parliament. Courts can and must review constitutional amendments that destroy the constitutional architecture itself: the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, the fundamental rights of citizens. A judge who applies this doctrine is not crossing into politics. She is performing the most fundamental judicial function: protecting the constitution from those who would use its formal procedures to destroy its substance.
Gustav Radbruch, writing from the ruins of a German legal system that had been hollowed out by the Nazi regime while maintaining the forms of law, gave us the vocabulary we need. His 1946 essay was titled Gesetzliches Unrecht und übergesetzliches Recht—Statutory Lawlessness and Supra-Statutory Law. The term gesetzliches Unrecht—statutory lawlessness—names the condition in which an instrument has the formal appearance of statute but, by reason of its deliberate betrayal of equality and of basic justice, lacks the essential nature of law.
The application to Pakistan is direct. A judge who sits on a bench constituted under the captured parliamentary selection procedure, who applies provisions that constitutionalise lifetime immunity for the military leadership while opposition politicians are denied bail, is not engaged in the neutral application of law. He is engaged in the administration of statutory lawlessness. Under the regime’s preferred framing, it is the resisting judge who must explain why he is departing from settled law. Under the Radbruchian reframing, the burden moves. The compliant judge must explain why he is administering provisions that, measured against the constitutional order he swore to uphold, constitute statutory lawlessness. He is the one who has departed from law. He is the one who has violated his oath.
VII. ACCOUNTABILITY: THE LOAD-BEARING CONCEPT
Let me pause and name the concept that underlies everything I have described—because it is the load-bearing pillar of the entire architecture of democracy, and because it is precisely the concept that autocracy is designed to destroy.
Accountability is the obligation of power to explain and justify itself to those over whom it is exercised. It operates at three levels. Vertical accountability is the electoral mechanism: citizens hold governments accountable through the ballot. Horizontal accountability is the institutional mechanism: courts hold legislatures accountable, legislatures hold executives accountable, each branch constraining the others. Diagonal accountability is the civil society mechanism: free media, independent researchers, international bodies, organised civic groups holding state power accountable through exposure, documentation, and the mobilisation of public and international pressure.
Autocracy systematically destroys all three forms simultaneously. Elections are rigged or rendered meaningless—vertical accountability eliminated. Courts and legislatures are captured—horizontal accountability eliminated. Civil society is suppressed, media is captured, international engagement is managed—diagonal accountability eliminated. The result is a system that generates power without obligation: authority that need never explain itself, never justify itself, never submit to review.
The intersection of accountability and the rule of law deserves precise statement. The rule of law is not merely the existence of rules. It is the application of rules equally, regardless of the identity of the party subject to them. A state in which powerful persons are exempt from the same rules that bind ordinary citizens—whether by constitutional immunity, patronage-based enforcement, or judicial capture—does not have rule of law. It has rule by law: the use of legal forms to entrench rather than constrain power. Accountability is what distinguishes rule of law from rule by law. And judicial independence is what makes accountability operational: without courts willing to apply the law equally to the powerful and the powerless, accountability is an aspiration without an instrument.
VIII. WHAT ARTISTS KNOW THAT LAWYERS DO NOT
Against the comprehensive landscape of institutional capitulation—judges who accommodate, lawyers who accept the land grant, bureaucrats who adapt, civil society workers who fall silent, political parties that join the arrangement—one constituency has historically maintained resistance with a consistency that demands examination. That constituency is artists, poets, and writers.
The judge, the lawyer, the bureaucrat, and the business executive all have careers embedded in institutional structures whose continued existence and reward systems are controlled, in the last analysis, by the state. When the state captures these institutions, it captures the professionals within them. The artist faces a structurally different relationship to power. Her audience is humanity—past, present, and future. Her currency is truth and beauty: categories the state can suppress but cannot manufacture, redefine, or award on its own terms. A poem cannot be unmade by the imprisonment of its author. A song is not silenced by breaking the singer’s hands. The manuscript memorised in secret cannot be seized by the police that burned the original.
I want to propose a frame for understanding this tradition: the Global Republic of Letters. Just as authoritarian governments coordinate their assaults—sharing the template of judicial capture from Budapest to Ankara to Islamabad—the voices of resistance form an equally coordinated, if uncoordinated, counter-tradition. From Faiz in Lahore’s Montgomery Jail to Neruda underground in Chile, from Akhmatova memorising her poems in a Leningrad prison queue to Baldwin writing in Paris exile, from Brecht composing verse during his flight from Nazi Germany to Lorde speaking in New York about the cost of silence—these writers did not know each other, did not plan together, did not share a manifesto. And yet they constitute a single continuous argument: that the human spirit, confronted with organised power’s demand for compliance, retains the capacity to say no, to witness, to speak, and to keep the moral imagination of a different order alive until the political moment changes.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote from Montgomery Jail. His Bol—Speak, for your lips are free—became the anthem of every democratic movement in Pakistan’s history, including the lawyers’ movement of 2007. Habib Jalib’s Dastoor—I cannot accept this dawn stained with darkness—was addressed directly to Ayub Khan’s authoritarian constitution in 1962. These are not merely beautiful poems. They are constitutional documents of the Pakistani people’s refusal to accept managed democracy as their permanent condition.
Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem was not merely a cycle of poems about the Stalinist terror. Its prose prologue is itself a constitutional act. She describes standing for seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad, when a woman with bluish lips recognised her and whispered: Can you describe this? Akhmatova answered: I can. That exchange is the entire justification of the witnessing vocation compressed into two lines. It is also my justification for writing a resignation letter rather than slipping quietly away from a captured court. Can you describe this? I can. I must.
Albert Camus, in The Rebel, defined the act of refusal with philosophical precision. The rebel says no—but his refusal simultaneously affirms the value being defended. The moment of resistance is not merely negative. It draws a line, names a limit, and in naming it, constitutes a moral community with all others who have drawn that line. This is why principled resignation from a captured court is not abandonment. It is the drawing of a line that the autocrat’s constitutional amendment cannot erase, because it is drawn not in law but in conscience.
Audre Lorde gave the accountability argument its most personal and most demanding formulation. Her silences had not protected her. From that recognition came the most clarifying sentence in the literature of resistance: Your silence will not protect you. This is what I want every judge who chose to stay in a captured court, every bar leader who accepted the land grant, every journalist who chose self-censorship, to understand. The comfort of silence is illusory. The institution will not protect you from the consequences of the bargain you made with it. Speaking—bearing witness, naming what is happening—is the only form of protection that has ever actually worked.
What must the legal world learn from all of this? Three things. First: constitutional conviction must precede and animate legal technique. The lawyer who has never been moved by a poem will not be moved by a constitutional argument at two in the morning when staying silent is easier. Second: the artist’s relationship to audience must be the model for the jurist’s. The artist’s audience is humanity—not the state, not the bar, not the regime. The constitutional jurist’s audience should be the same. Third: resistance is kept alive in the dark times not by institutions but by individuals and their work. Institutions can be captured. Constitutions can be amended. Courts can be packed. But the Global Republic of Letters cannot be captured. Its membership is open to anyone willing to say: I can describe this. And I will.
- THE ROADMAP: RECLAIMING DEMOCRACY
Let me turn to the constructive agenda—the spine of this address. Not with false optimism, but with the recognition that authoritarianism is fragile, that democratic resilience is possible, and that we know enough about what works to offer a real roadmap.
The first question is whether democracy—given everything we have examined about its current failures—is still the right aspiration. The answer is yes, with Churchill’s humility. Democracy’s genius is not that it produces wise governance. It is that it provides a mechanism for removing unwise governance without violence. The peaceful transfer of power is the civilisational achievement that every authoritarian system cannot replicate.
But formal endorsement of democracy is not enough. Every autocracy endorses democracy in its constitutional text. What is required is the construction of a culture that makes democracy’s protectors—lawyers, judges, journalists, civil servants, citizens—unwilling to betray it. Law schools must become the incubators of this culture. They must stop producing technically excellent servants of power and start producing constitutionally grounded democratic citizens.
This is the centrepiece. Constitutional courts do not defend themselves. Amendments do not resist their own misuse. They are activated—or they remain inert text—depending on whether the lawyers, judges, bar leaders, academics, and civil servants in whose hands they are placed understand what they are for and have the moral formation to act accordingly. The lawyer who refuses to take the co-optation brief, the judge who refuses to sign the order, the law officer who resigns rather than defend the indefensible—each is a person who was formed somewhere. Most of them were formed in law school. That is why legal education reform is not one element of the roadmap among others. It is the centrepiece—the long investment on which every shorter investment eventually depends.
The current curriculum across South Asia, and increasingly across the Global North, has a predictable output: the technically excellent servant of power. Statutory interpretation, procedural rules, evidentiary standards—taught with rigour. Constitutional theory taught as doctrine rather than as commitment. The history of constitutional failure—the captured courts of Hungary and Turkey and Pakistan—taught, if at all, as case-law to be memorised for examinations rather than as the living inheritance that must shape the lawyer’s sense of what her profession is for. Political philosophy relegated to the elective margin. The sociology of judicial capture—Hilbink, Baum, Scheppele, Jan—almost entirely absent. The Radbruch formula, which gives the constitutional lawyer her most powerful vocabulary for naming statutory lawlessness, known to a handful of academics and to almost no practitioners. The lawyer who has never heard of gesetzliches Unrecht cannot name it when she sees it.
The curriculum must include what the poetry, music, and literature of resistance teach that doctrine alone cannot: that constitutional argument is not a technical exercise but a moral practice. Faiz’s Bol, Jalib’s Dastoor, Akhmatova’s Requiem, Havel’s Power of the Powerless, Baldwin’s essays—these belong in the constitutional law seminar, not outside it. The lawyer who will stand before a restored court in 2040 is in a first-year classroom in 2026. The judge who will write the opinion striking down the constitutional amendment of 2045 is currently writing her third-year essay. Reforming the classroom is the longest and most patient work in the roadmap. It is also the work without which every other element will find that the people required to carry it forward have not been made.
Making constitutional courts more resilient requires six interdependent dimensions. Doctrinal empowerment: courts must have the legal tools to refuse constitutional dismantlement, including the basic structure doctrine. Structural empowerment: security of tenure, financial independence, random case allocation, appointment processes that no single political actor can control. Professional empowerment: bar associations that treat the defence of judicial independence as a core professional obligation, structurally prevented from accepting the land grants and committee positions that co-optation uses as its currency. Epistemic empowerment: legal education that forms judges and lawyers as constitutional guardians, not technical operators. Democratic empowerment: an activated citizenry that makes capturing courts politically costly. And the selection imperative: choosing constitutional court judges not only for technical competence but for demonstrated constitutional character—for the lawyer who took the difficult position, the academic who wrote the honest thing, the bar leader who refused the land grant.
There is one more door any serious restoration must close, and its history in Pakistan is so long and so consequential that closing it requires the same deliberate structural work as dismantling the Federal Constitutional Court itself. The Doctrine of Necessity is the judicially-supplied rationale that has legitimised every extra-constitutional rupture in Pakistani history. It entered our law through Chief Justice Munir’s 1955 opinions invoking Bracton’s maxim—that which is otherwise not lawful is made lawful by necessity—to validate the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. It was deployed to validate Ayub Khan’s 1958 martial law in Dosso, Zia’s 1977 martial law in Nusrat Bhutto, and Musharraf’s 1999 takeover in Zafar Ali Shah. Each invocation degraded the Constitution further. And the door remains open. In August 2024, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh invoked the Doctrine of Necessity to legitimise the extra-constitutional interim government that took office after the fall of Sheikh Hasina, tracing its reasoning explicitly back to the Pakistani Maulvi Tamizuddin precedent. Once the doctrine is invoked, there is no principled stopping point.
A New Charter of Democracy must include the explicit, textually entrenched repudiation of the Doctrine of Necessity as a source of constitutional authority. The establishment’s primary resource in moments of civilian crisis has always been the Doctrine of Necessity supplied by a compliant bench. Removing that resource—structurally, not merely rhetorically—changes the constitutional calculus of every future crisis.
CLOSING
I come from the Global South. I have described the failures of the Global North. What this means is that we cannot afford, anywhere, the luxury of pointing elsewhere. The crisis of democracy is not the crisis of someone else’s democracy. It is the crisis of democracy itself—of the idea that power can be held accountable, that rights can be protected against majorities, that the weakest citizen is entitled to the same constitutional protection as the most powerful.
Eleanor Roosevelt asked, on the occasion of the Universal Declaration’s adoption, where human rights begin. Her answer: In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person.
That is where democratic resilience begins too: in the accumulation of small refusals—the lawyer who will not take the brief, the judge who will not sign the order, the journalist who will not self-censor, the civil servant who will not look away, the law student who will not forget what she was taught, the poet who will not stop writing.
Nations that prosper are those that place the rule of law at the heart of their governance and preserve judicial independence as a sacred trust. Where justice is shackled, nations do not merely falter. They lose their moral compass. History bears witness: when courts fall silent, societies descend into darkness.
On the last page of my resignation letter, I found the only language adequate to that moment—the words of Ahmad Faraz:
My pen is a trust held for my people.
My pen is the court of my conscience.
I swear by a lifetime of hardships:
the journey of my pen will not go to waste.
Neither will yours.
Thank you.