PTI leader and senior lawyer Hamid Khan along with others announces to start lawyers movement against the 26th constitutional amendment, which is termed as an anti-judiciary bill.
Early on Monday, October 21, 2024, the 26th Constitutional Amendment Bill passed both the Senate and the National Assembly with ease after the ruling coalition, led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), eventually showed a two-thirds majority in both houses of parliament with a few dissident votes from PTI.
The legal community said that they will soon establish a Lawyers Action Committee on the matter and pledged to not accept any Chief Justice of Pakistan appointments other than the most senior judge, Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah.
However the lawyers and judges so far failed to show any spine towards this amendment and chose to remain a mere ‘silent spectator’.
Senior attorneys Hamid Khan and Abid Shahid Zubairi, together with other attorneys, stated during a news conference outside the Supreme Court that they would only accept the most senior judge as the Chief Justice.
Hamid Khan expressed their disapproval of the Constitutional Package and hinted towards a strong reaction despite lacking unity within lawyers community.
During the Lawyers Movement in (2007–2009), passionate attorneys demonstrated for weeks in Pakistani cities and towns against the military dictator Pervez Musharraf’s forcible removal of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The division in lawyers in 2024 puts a question mark on success of this announced movement.
In an effort to restore judicial independence in Pakistan and reinstate Iftikhar Chaudhry as Chief Justice, some 80,000 attorneys united across conventional political boundaries in Pakistan. The first time in Pakistan’s history that attorneys have dropped their clashing political affiliations and formed an unprecedented professional unity for reestablishing the rule of law.
The success of the movement was largely due to the Pakistani attorneys’ capacity for strategic organization. The movement benefited from the decentralized framework that Pakistani legal system already provided. The organization of then-Pakistan’s legal community provided a tried-and-true means of reaching the movement’s activists with messages.
With the help of the Pakistan Bar Association (PBC), the Lawyers National Action Committee (LNAC) formulated all of the movement’s major decisions, and local bar councils throughout the nation distributed its messages. The attorneys were able to organize swiftly and efficiently because the movement’s communication network and structure were established before it was even conceived.
The lawyers’ movement not only put pressure on the Musharraf dictatorship at home but also advocated for international assistance. The attorneys’ movement’s attempts to contact world leaders were closely related to the emergency rule’s removal. In order to get their support, Chief Justice Chaudhry personally sent letters to representatives in the US and the UK. In the end, these two nations, which had supported Musharraf in large part because of his help in fighting terrorism, urged him to lift his emergency rule.
This may serve as a template for lawyers in 2024, although in contrast to today, attorneys were more organized and prepared to put aside their political affiliations in favor of a broader interest.
