The 26th Amendment, passed in October 2024, changed how the Chief Justice of Pakistan is appointed, replacing automatic seniority with selection by a parliamentary Special Committee from among the three most senior Supreme Court judges, and created constitutional benches inside the Supreme Court and High Courts to hear constitutional cases separately from ordinary appeals. The 27th Amendment went further, establishing a new Federal Constitutional Court entirely separate from the Supreme Court to hear constitutional matters going forward.
2022 amendments to the National Accountability Ordinance raised the minimum value of a case the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) could pursue from Rs 4 million to Rs 500 million and moved many pending cases below that threshold to ordinary courts. The changes were challenged in the Supreme Court, which in a September 2023 ruling upheld most of them while restoring NAB's jurisdiction over a smaller set of cases.
The Election Commission of Pakistan administered the February 2024 general election, the country's 12th, with roughly 128.6 million registered voters. Sixty seats reserved for women and ten reserved for religious minorities in the National Assembly are allocated to parties in proportion to the general seats they win, a mechanism that was the subject of a major Supreme Court dispute in 2024 over how those seats should be assigned to independent-aligned candidates.
Pakistan ranks last in the world, 143rd of 143 countries, on the Rule of Law Index's Order and Security factor, the same overall index in which it ranks 130th of 143 nations. No other factor the Index measures drags the overall score down as hard.
The 26th and 27th Amendments restructured how judges are appointed and created a new constitutional court. How this affects judicial independence in practice is genuinely contested: proponents describe it as parliamentary oversight of an unaccountable judiciary, while international legal bodies including the International Commission of Jurists and Amnesty International have raised concerns about increased executive influence over judicial appointments.
Women hold about 15% of National Assembly seats, but only around 4% of directly contested general seats went to women in the 2024 election. The reserved-seat mechanism, not electoral competition, remains what produces most of the chamber's female representation.
