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Pakistan’s 27th constitutional amendment expands the military and army chief’s authority, allowing government and Parliament sweeping control over the judiciary

Pakistan has a new political order. On 13 November, Pakistan’s Parliament signed the 27th constitutional amendment into law, creating the country’s first constitutionally fortified sovereign military and, at the same time, severely curtailing the judiciary, making it a mere ancillary to the military controlled-executive. On the one hand, the 27th Amendment was the logical and possibly inevitable next step after the 26th Amendment in October 2024 delivered an authoritarian hit to the judiciary. On the other hand, the new legislation has allowed the most significant restructuring of the government, signalled the complete capitulation of the civilian political establishment to the military, and made the army – and particularly its chief – the leading and effectively unassailable political player. 

The 27th Amendment has expanded the military’s authority and formalised what had previously been unofficial practice. It has transformed the role of the Chief of Army Staff into the Chief of Defence Forces (CDF). It has abolished the post of the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee and established the Commander of the National Strategic Command, who will be an army officer appointed in consultation with the CDF. All these changes grant unprecedented constitutional power to the head of the army, Asim Munir, who was promoted to the rank of field marshall in May this year.  

The amendment allows the CDF to be removed not through a simple majority in Parliament but by a two-thirds majority – the same number of parliamentary votes required to change the constitution itself. An elected prime minister, by contrast, can be removed with a simple majority, that is, if 51 percent of the National Assembly members support a vote of no confidence. In a republic where civilian leaders remain precarious by design, the military chief has been granted a permanence that no other public office enjoys. 

Under the 27th Amendment, the executive and the legislature now exercise sweeping control over the judiciary in several critical ways. First, it creates a new Federal Constitutional Court (FCC), which will be the highest court in the country and will absorb virtually all constitutional cases that previously went to the Supreme Court, including public interest litigation and fundamental rights disputes. The first set judges of the FCC – who could very well set the path of the court and for subsequent judges – including its first chief justice, have been handpicked by the president on the advice of the prime minister. Later appointments to the court will be made by an executive-controlled Judicial Commission of Pakistan (JCP).

FOR YEARS, Pakistan’s higher judiciary has been hollowed out by its own overreach. In 2009, Iftikhar Chaudhry returned to his position as the Chief Justice of Pakistan. He had previously been removed by the president, Pervez Musharraf, for questioning his right to remain in office. After Chaudhry’s return, the Supreme Court and High Courts embraced increasingly populist postures, inserting themselves into routine matters of governance – even taking up matters on bids for liquefied natural gas supply and price regulation suo motu –  in a bid to become political actors in their own right. Yet their assertiveness occasionally produced rulings that checked military power. The Supreme Court’s October 2023 judgment declaring civilian trials in military courts unconstitutional was one such rare challenge, even though a larger bench reversed it in 2025. These episodes underscored that, despite its flaws, the higher judiciary could still serve as an arena where military overreach was exposed. This has also made the military establishment nervous that the Supreme Court could free Imran Khan, the jailed and still hugely popular leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI). Khan’s exoneration could upend the military leadership’s plans for overhauling Pakistan’s political system with the military at its centre.

The 27th Amendment has staved off that threat. By formalising and expanding the military’s constitutional authority, the amendment leaves even less room for judicial scrutiny, effectively ensuring that the courts that once dared to question the generals are structurally bound to defer to them.

The JCP, which vets and recommends high court judges and will recommend FCC judges, has also been restructured to give the executive a stronger say while weakening judicial representation. The executive gains the power to recommend transfers of high court judges through this revamped JCP. Any judge who refuses such a transfer can be “deemed to have retired”. By reengineering the court system, controlling appointments and transfers and limiting judicial initiative, the executive and Parliament have effectively reduced the judiciary to a subservient institution. A day after the amendment was passed, two Supreme Court justices, Syed Mansoor Ali Shah and Athar Minallah, resigned in protest and warned that the change “subjugates the judiciary to executive control” and amounts to a “grave assault” on the constitution.

Pakistan’s political class and much of its judiciary barely flinched as the 27th Amendment rewired the country’s power structure. The Parliament pushed it through in days, not because it was convinced, but because it was compliant. The amendment’s smooth passage reflected a simple political logic: major parties calculated that aligning with the military’s institutional redesign would secure their own futures.

For the Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PML–N), the bet is obvious. The party is already projecting the current chief minister of Punjab Maryam Nawaz, the daughter of Nawaz Sharif, as a national leader. Her portraits across Punjab frame her as a prime minister-in-waiting, and the party’s loyalty to the military might be rewarded with her elevation to the top post later. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) is playing the same game. It wants Bilawal Bhutto Zardari to take the premiership next. In Islamabad, many assume both parties have received informal signals that each will get a shot at the top job – a political rota blessed, or at least tolerated, by the military establishment. Whether such a power-sharing understanding actually exists is beside the point. What matters is that Pakistan’s major parties behave as if it does, rushing through a constitutional overhaul to stay in the good graces of the only institution that can enforce, or upend, these promises. With elections four years away, the real test will be whether this presumed arrangement survives the shifting calculations of the generals who ultimately referee the system.

THE TIMING OF the 27th Amendment is no accident. Pakistan’s current political architecture teeters on the edge of instability, with the National Assembly – the lower house of Parliament – standing on exceptionally flimsy grounds. This legislature was elected in February 2024 amid widespread allegations of vote rigging, ballot tampering and procedural irregularities. Many across the country question its mandate. The PTI, for instance, continues to claim that its mandate was stolen. Its petitions challenging election results are still pending, and it continues to enjoy wide public support, with Khan’s imprisonment only adding to the public sense of injustice on his behalf. The survival of the National Assembly and of the executive – the government led by Shehbaz Sharif of the PML-N – depends on the goodwill of the military establishment, which remains the ultimate arbiter of political power. The amendment is therefore not a mere legal tweak; it is a guarantee of survival, codifying the army’s political primacy and shielding the current civilian leadership from the very fragility that marks its existence. 

By entrenching the army chief’s permanence and limiting the parliament’s capacity to challenge him, the 27th Amendment ensures that the current political players, though reduced to junior partners, remain in office at least until 2029, when the next election is constitutionally due. In essence, the amendment converts a moment of political vulnerability into a permanent constitutional pact of dependence on the military, formalising the hierarchy that has long operated behind the scenes.

The top court’s judges, Shah and Minallah, decided to resign rather than challenge the amendment because Pakistan’s judicial institutions had already been stripped of several powers via the 26th Amendment. That amendment removed the Supreme Court’s suo motu powers and its ability to take up cases of public importance on its own. It also imposed a three-year term limit on the Chief Justice and replaced the long-standing principle of seniority whereby the seniormost judge was automatically elevated to the position of Chief Justice. The power to choose the Chief Justice was handed over to a Special Parliamentary Committee, with eight members from the National Assembly and four from the Senate, who decide among the three most senior justices. In Pakistan’s context, this means that the judge most likely to play their designated political role will be picked. 

The restructured JCP relegates judicial members to a minority and gives the Parliament and the executive a decisive say in which judges are elevated or transferred. The International Commission of Jurists called this “a blow to judicial independence”, warning that political actors would now be able to pack constitutional benches with judges tailored to hear cases of political significance.

The political opposition in Pakistan is all but extinct, at least in the mainstream, and reduced to the fractured shell of the PTI. Imran Khan remains jailed, the party is beleaguered by infighting, and it is powerless to mount a serious parliamentary challenge to the 27th Amendment or to mobilise civil society. 

IN PAKISTAN, political space for dissent has been systematically legislated into submission. The 2025 amendments to the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act imposed disproportionate controls on digital information on the pretext of curbing the spread of “false and fake information”, with penalties of up to three years in prison and huge fines. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan strongly condemned the law, warning that it would be weaponised to target “political workers, human rights defenders, journalists and dissidents by effectively penalizing criticism of state institutions.” The law is one key reason why there have been few large protests against the 27th Amendment anywhere across Pakistan – something that might already be adding to the illusion of the amendment being accepted by the public. 

Pakistan’s political logic will be permanently shaped by the imperatives of the military establishment. In practical terms, the country’s future is now inseparable from the path laid out by the army, and a militarised alignment is now codified into the constitution. Even if the PTI or any other civilian force somehow returns to power, it will be forced to operate within the boundaries set by the military, unable to undo these changes without the near-impossible feat of securing a two-thirds majority in a fragmented Parliament. Given the entrenched manipulation of elections and the military’s very well-known pervasive influence over political outcomes, such a majority is extremely unlikely.

To regain any semblance of the parliamentary democracy envisioned in Pakistan’s constitution of 1973, the opposition and civil society will have to rise above factionalism and partisan rivalries and present a united front to reclaim constitutionalism and push back against a system designed to render civilian authority subordinate. This will require strategic coordination, public mobilisation, secure digital activism and sustained international attention.

Salman Rafi Sheikh is an assistant professor of politics at Lahore University of Management Sciences. 

This article was originally published on Himal,South Asian.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.