Pakistan's judiciary has been systematically converted into an instrument of the security establishment it was originally designed to check, according to findings cited in an analysis by One World Outlook, drawing on a report by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) titled 'Under the Bench: Mapping Corruption Risks in Pakistan's Justice System'. The findings, published on 12 July, paint a damning picture of a legal system where justice has effectively become a commodity.

Scale of the Crisis

With approximately 2.4 million cases pending across Pakistani courts, the country ranks 101st out of 143 nations on criminal justice and 129th on civil justice in the World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index. Critics argue this backlog is not accidental.

'Backlog of this magnitude is not merely an inefficiency; it is a resource that can be allocated. A hearing date can be bought or buried. A First Information Report — the document that formally opens a criminal case in Pakistan — can be delayed or accelerated for a price, and evidence can be quietly reshaped along the way,' the One World Outlook article stated.

The analysis describes the outcome not as a failure of justice but as its deliberate transformation into a commodity — available to those who can pay, and effectively denied to those who cannot.

Constitutional Restructuring Strips Judicial Independence

The report does not attribute the crisis solely to systemic dysfunction. It identifies a more deliberate process: a constitutional restructuring that has progressively hollowed out whatever judicial independence Pakistan's courts once possessed.

'The 26th and 27th amendments, passed in 2024 and 2025, inserted Members of Parliament into the body that selects judges, empowered a judicial council to remove judges for the conveniently vague offence of 'inefficiency', and created a new Federal Constitutional Court whose leadership is effectively chosen by the Prime Minister (Shehbaz Sharif),' the article noted, citing the FIDH findings.

This restructuring, critics argue, has formalised what was previously an informal arrangement — giving the executive and military establishment direct levers over judicial appointments and removals.

Blasphemy Cases Expose Systemic Bias

The report's findings on blasphemy cases are particularly stark. According to the analysis, nearly 800 people were detained on blasphemy charges in 2024 alone, drawn overwhelmingly from poor and minority communities. Conviction rates in such cases run at approximately 95%, reportedly driven by judges reluctant to confront extremist pressure and by evidentiary contradictions that defendants lack the money or connections to challenge.

This pattern, the report suggests, illustrates how the system disproportionately consumes the powerless while leaving the well-connected largely untouched.

Watchdog Bodies Turned Into Instruments of Selective Punishment

Institutions nominally designed as safeguards — including the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), and the Supreme Judicial Council — are described by insiders as tools of selective enforcement rather than independent oversight.

'Anti-corruption bodies that might address any of this are described by those closest to the system not as safeguards but as instruments of selective punishment, wielded against critics of the military and shelved for everyone else,' the One World Outlook article said.

Journalists and whistleblowers who attempt to document these patterns face their own legal exposure, reportedly under defamation statutes and cyber-crime laws — the same legislation that has been used against activists such as Mazari — for the act of scrutinising the system too closely.

What This Means for Pakistan's Democratic Trajectory

Taken together, the FIDH report and the One World Outlook analysis present Pakistan's judicial crisis not as a governance failure awaiting reform, but as an architecture of control operating largely as intended by those who benefit from it. This comes amid sustained international scrutiny of Pakistan's civil liberties record and growing pressure from rights organisations for structural judicial reform. How Islamabad responds — if at all — will be a significant test of its stated commitments to rule of law.