From a 1958 ruling that blessed a coup after the fact to a 2025 amendment that pre-clears the next one, Pakistan’s courts haven’t resisted military power — they’ve been steadily destroyed to make resisting it impossible. This is the record of how that happened, and how the same pattern is playing out again right now.

Pakistan’s judiciary has finally been conquered by its military. It has always been part of the country’s governing elite ecosystem, and for most of the country’s history it volunteered to give cover to the military’s misadventures. But in recent years it has become one of the tools in the arsenal the military unleashes on its own citizens — from trying civilians in military courts, to postponing elections, to efforts to ban political parties and harass and suppress dissent even outside Pakistan.

The Permission Slip Era (1958–2000)

Pakistan’s military has a long record of getting its way with the judiciary. In October 1958, six days after Ayub Khan’s coup, Chief Justice Muhammad Munir used an unrelated case, State v. Dosso, to bless it anyway — ruling that an unresisted seizure of power creates its own legitimacy. The resulting phrase, the “doctrine of necessity,” became Pakistani law’s most durable euphemism.

The pattern repeated in 1977, when the Court validated Zia-ul-Haq’s coup in Nusrat Bhutto v. Chief of Army Staff, and again in 2000, when Zafar Ali Shah v. General Pervez Musharraf validated Musharraf’s takeover and handed him power to amend the constitution for three years. Three coups, three courts, three rulings that turned a general’s ambition into constitutional fact after the fact — the judiciary as an emergency notary, called in after the tanks had rolled to stamp the outcome legal.

Read more: The Psychology of Collective Trauma and Institutional Betrayal in Pakistan

The Interruption That Wasn’t (2007–2009)

Then, briefly, something seemed to change. When Musharraf dismissed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry in 2007 and, months later, imposed a Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO) demanding a fresh loyalty oath from every judge, roughly a hundred judges refused it and were placed under house arrest. Lawyers took to the streets in black coats. It became the Lawyers’ Movement, and in July 2009 a........

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