ISLAMABAD:
Former Supreme Court Justice Mansoor Ali Shah has 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 a breakdown.
The former Supreme Court Justice was speaking at the NYU Research Symposium on Legal Empowerment and Autocracy in Accra, Ghana.
“I speak today as one who resigned from the Supreme Court of Pakistan on November 13, 2025, because I could no longer uphold 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 to where it stood in 1985,” he added.
“Freedom is in retreat, and those who retreat retreat faster than those who advance. This space—this symposium on legal empowerment and autocracy—is exactly where the counter-strategy must be built.”
The former Supreme Court judge notes that the 26th and 27th Constitutional Amendments, although passed with a two-thirds parliamentary majority, amounted to “the destruction of the Constitution”.
“Formally, they were constitutional acts. Materially, they were the destruction of the constitution. This is autocratic legalism at its most sophisticated: using the forms of democracy to erode its content,” he said.
Outlining a roadmap for people, lawyers, judges and institutions, Justice Shah suggests rebuilding legal education as a foundation for 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 justice—as core curriculum, not optional enrichment. And that means immersing future judges and lawyers in the cultural legal tradition of poetry, those who have never been resistant to the art: the music. moved by poetry will not be moved by a constitutional argument at two o’clock in the morning, when it is so much easier to remain silent.”
