On 10 February 2025, lawyers in black coats marched on Islamabad believing the constitutional order was being fundamentally reshaped and that the judiciary could no longer resist it from within.
from across the country to protest the 26th Constitutional Amendment and the convening of the Judicial Commission of Pakistan for Supreme Court appointments. Barricades rose around the Red Zone. Police lined the approaches to the Supreme Court. Protesters invoked constitutional supremacy and judicial independence.
For a brief moment, it looked like 2007 again.
It was not.
The movement of 2007 possessed something rare: moral simplicity. The confrontation was instantly understood. The symbolism was direct. The legal fraternity responded with unity and persistence that eventually forced a reversal.
The protests of February 2025 offered no such clarity. The dispute concerned judicial appointments, constitutional procedure, and institutional seniority, serious but legally dense questions. To a public burdened by inflation and instability, the crisis appeared distant from everyday survival. The black coat no longer carried the uncontested moral authority it once did.
The legal community itself was divided. Some viewed the amendments as a direct assault on judicial independence. Others considered them controversial but constitutionally permissible. Some joined the protests openly; others questioned whether the movement had become entangled in opposition politics and establishment rivalries. Without unanimity, momentum never crystallised.
The state responded not with panic but with procedural continuity. The Judicial Commission meeting proceeded despite the demonstrations. By ensuring appointments continued uninterrupted, the government deprived the movement of its immediate leverage.
What the movement needed was not louder voices on the street but quieter resolve on the bench, judges willing to remain, resist, and force the state to confront principled opposition from within. For much of the legal community, that expectation was embodied in Justice Mansoor Ali Shah and Justice Athar Minallah, whose reputations had come to stand for precisely that kind of internal resistance.
They did not remain.
Over years of jurisprudence, both men came to symbolise constitutional seriousness and institutional courage. Many lawyers believed that even if protests failed, these judges would hold the line inside the court.
That belief proved misplaced.
When both justices resigned, shock hardened into disillusionment. Their resignations were framed as acts of principle against an unconstitutional assault on judicial independence. That framing deserves scrutiny.
Resignation, however principled, is ultimately an act of abandonment. It removes the judge from the very institution they claim to defend. What the resignations achieved, in practical terms, was the removal of the two most capable internal dissenters precisely when dissent was most needed.
The black coats marched believing the state could still be compelled to pause. The state did not pause. They marched believing the judiciary still contained figures willing to resist from within. The judges did not hold.
In those twin refusals lay the true measure of what the movement could not survive.
Yet even amid that collapse of institutional will, one reality endured: the strength of resistance ultimately rested in the last man standing, the figure about whom few now dare speak lightly, because he proved himself not merely a participant in defiance, but its enduring symbol.
Barrister Syed Hamid Jamal
Based in Peshawar
Email: syedhamidjamal@gmail.com
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