ISLAMABAD:
Former Supreme Court Justice Mansoor Ali Shah 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 collapse.
The former high court judge delivered a speech at the New York University Research Symposium on Legal Empowerment and Autocracy in Accra, Ghana.
“I speak today as someone who resigned from the Supreme Court of Pakistan on November 13, 2025, because he could no longer fulfill 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 fallen back to where it was in 1985,” he added.
“Freedom is in retreat, and those who retreat are doing so faster than those who advance. This room – this symposium on legal empowerment and autocracy – is exactly where the counterstrategy must be built.”
The former Supreme Court judge points out that the 26th and 27th constitutional amendments, although approved 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 in its most sophisticated form: using the forms of democracy to empty its content,” he said.
Justice Shah, outlining a roadmap for people, lawyers, judges and institutions, suggests rebuilding legal education as a foundation of 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 a core curriculum, not as 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 o’clock. tomorrow, when remaining silent is much easier.”
