Authored By: Sara Jamil
Punjab Colleges
1. INTRODUCTION:
Since Pakistan’s independence , three martial laws and presidentially engineered dismissals have contributed to a result that no civilian government in Pakistan has completed it’s five-year term until in 2013. [1]This political instability has caused Pakistan to suffer through discontinuity in policy, weak political parties, and a judiciary repeatedly summoned to bless extra-constitutional change through what came to be called the doctrine of necessity. This article argues that the stability of Pakistan’s democracy depends on treating the electorate’s five-year mandate as presumptively secure, capable of being cut short only through the finite set of mechanisms the Constitution itself provides : a lawful vote of no-confidence, voluntary resignation, or a dissolution that is properly advised and subject to judicial scrutiny. Never through military intervention, manipulated procedural rulings, or externally engineered “in-house changes.”
2. CONSTITUTIONL BASIS OF FIVE YEAR TERM :
Article 52 fixes the term of the National Assembly at five years from the date of its first meeting, unless it is dissolved sooner.[2] Article 105 mirrors this guarantee for the provincial assemblies.[3] Also, the Preamble’s commitment to democracy, these provisions operationalise popular sovereignty. A term that can end only through pre-defined constitutional triggers gives citizens, political parties, and international partners confidence in the predictability of the political calender while the term ended with sufficient extra-constitutional leverage discourage long term party building and civillians become willing to operate outside the constitution leading to stress and destabilization.
3. THE CONSTITUTIONS OWN EXIT MECHANISM :
3.1 Vote of No Confidence – Article 95
The five-year term was never intended to immunise non-performing governments from accountability. Article 95(1) permits not less than twenty percent of the National Assembly’s total membership to move a resolution of no-confidence against the Prime Minister.[4] Under Article 95(2), the resolution cannot be voted on before the expiry of three days, nor later than seven days, from the day it is moved.[5] If it carries by a majority of the total membership of the Assembly. The Prime Minister ceases to hold office immediately and cannot be asked by the President to continue in office under Article 94, an option reserved for a Prime Minister who resigns or whose successor has yet to take office.[6] Between 1988 and 2022, only one no-confidence motion against a sitting Prime Minister actually succeeded; the motion against Imran Khan on 10 April 2022.[7] That rarity reflects the threshold’s demanding design, and confirms that, when its conditions are genuinely met, Article 95 is the Constitution’s own answer to the question of how an underperforming or unpopular government should fall.
3.2 Dissolution and Resignation
A Prime Minister may resign under Article 94, or may advise the President to dissolve the Assembly and call fresh elections.[8] Historically, Article 58(2)(b), inserted by the Eighth Amendment in 1985, additionally empowered the President to dissolve the Assembly in his own discretion wherever he formed the opinion that constitutional government could no longer be carried on.[9] Between 1988 and 1996, this discretion was used four times to remove elected governments — the governments of Muhammad Khan Junejo in 1988 and Benazir Bhutto in 1990 and 1996 were dismissed under it, and Nawaz Sharif’s government was dismissed in 1993 before the Supreme Court restored it, holding that the record did not support dissolution.[10] Parliament repealed the clause through the Thirteenth Amendment in 1997, a modified version was revived by the Seventeenth Amendment in 2003, and it was finally abolished altogether by the Eighteenth Amendment in 2010.[11] Since then, the President may dissolve the Assembly only on the Prime Minister’s advice, and as seen in 2022 even that advice is not beyond the legal constitutional.
3.3 The Anti-Defection Clause — Article 63-A
A no-confidence vote is only as trustworthy as the votes cast in it. Article 63-A disqualifies a member who votes, or abstains, contrary to the direction of his parliamentary party on a defined set of pivotal questions, including a vote of confidence or no-confidence, election of the Prime Minister or Chief Minister, a constitutional amendment bill, or a money bill.[12] Its purpose is to deter the floor-crossing and vote-buying that historically destabilised coalition governments,[13] but, disagreement over how strictly it should be enforced has itself become a source of the very instability it was designed to prevent.
3.4 Judicial Review under Article 184(3)
Finally, Article 184(3) gives the Supreme Court original jurisdiction to enforce fundamental rights and to decide questions of public importance,[14] equipping it, at least in principle, to strike down any purported change of government that departs from these procedures.
4. FROM VALIDATION TO REPUDIATION : THE DOCTRINE OF NECESSITY
These mechanisms mean little if a sufficiently powerful actor can set the Constitution aside and expect judicial ratification afterwards. For much of Pakistan’s early history, that expectation was justified. In The State v Dosso, the Supreme Court invoked Hans Kelsen’s theory of revolutionary legality to validate General Ayub Khan’s 1958 coup, reasoning that a successful revolution which secures effective control over the state creates its own legal order.[15] The same logic reappeared in Begum Nusrat Bhutto v Chief of Army Staff, where the Court validated General Zia-ul-Haq’s 1977 martial law as an act of state necessity,[16] and again, with conditions attached, in Syed Zafar Ali Shah v General Pervez Musharraf, which validated the 1999 coup while directing a return to elected government within three years.[17]
That doctrine did not go unchallenged. In Asma Jilani v Government of the Punjab, the Supreme Court expressly overruled Dosso, holding that General Yahya Khan’s 1969 martial law had been an illegal usurpation of power rather than a legally effective revolution, and that a transfer of power in breach of a settled constitutional succession could not create a new legal order merely because it succeeded.[18] That correction was reaffirmed still more emphatically in Sindh High Court Bar Association v Federation of Pakistan, where a fourteen-judge bench declared the entire 2007 Musharraf emergency void from its inception, restoring the pre-emergency judiciary and denying any legal effect to acts taken under it.[19] Read together, these cases mark the judiciary’s belated but decisive rejection of the idea that effective seizure of power can, by itself, substitute for constitutional legitimacy.
5. THE 2022 CRISIS AND ITS UNFINISHED AFTER MATHS:
The resilience and the continuing fragility of these safeguards was finally tested in April 2022. Facing a no-confidence motion he was widely reported to lack the numbers to survive, Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government had the National Assembly’s deputy speaker rule the motion itself unconstitutional under Article 5, on the ground that it was linked to an alleged foreign-backed conspiracy against the state.[20] The Assembly was then dissolved on the Prime Minister’s advice before any vote could be taken.[21] The Supreme Court took suo motu notice and, in Suo Motu Case No 1 of 2022, unanimously set aside the deputy speaker’s ruling and the resulting dissolution as contrary to the Constitution anssssssssssd of no legal effect, restoring the Assembly and directing that the no-confidence vote proceed.[22] Khan was removed by that vote on 10 April 2022 — the first Prime Minister actually ousted through Article 95 in Pakistan’s history.[23]
Yet the accompanying Article 63-A litigation shows how contested the boundaries of these safeguards remain. On a Presidential Reference filed by Khan’s own government before its fall, a narrowly divided Supreme Court held in May 2022, by a three-to-two majority, that votes cast by defecting members on four categories of question — including a confidence or no-confidence motion — could not be counted at all.[24] The two dissenting judges warned that this went beyond interpretation into rewriting the Constitution.[25] In October 2024, a differently composed five-judge bench unanimously reversed course, holding that a defector’s vote must be counted, leaving disqualification, not vote-nullification, as Article 63-A’s only sanction.[26]Commentators noted that the timing coincided with the government’s effort to assemble the supermajority needed for the Twenty-Sixth Amendment.[27]
That same Twenty-Sixth Amendment, passed weeks later in October 2024, curtailed the Supreme Court’s suo motu jurisdiction under Article 184(3), among other changes to judicial appointments.[28] Whatever else it achieved, critics argue that narrowing the very jurisdiction the Court invoked in 2022 correspondingly narrows the judiciary’s capacity to perform the same rescue in a future crisis.[29]
6. CONSEQUENCES OF DEPARTING FROM CONSTITUTIONAL PROCESS :
The costs of premature, extra-constitutionally engineered changes of government are not merely doctrinal. Politically, each interruption reset the policy clock, discouraged the institution-building that durable parties require, and normalised reliance on the tacit approval of the military “establishment” as an unwritten precondition for a government’s survival — a dynamic scholars have described as a hybrid civil-military regime.[30] Economically, episodes of engineered political uncertainty have repeatedly coincided with currency pressure and stalled reform programmes, though isolating the precise economic cost of any single episode is inherently difficult. Institutionally, a judiciary repeatedly called upon to bless or unwind changes of government becomes, whether it wishes to or not, a political actor — a burden the polarised public reception of the 2022 episode illustrates.[31]Pakistan has suffered a lot from unconstitutionalism , now its time to think and not repeat the same mistakes again and again.
7. COUNTERARGUMENTS AND UNRESOLVED TENSIONS :
A rule-of-law case for tenure security should not obscure genuine tensions on the other side. First, defenders of a stricter accountability model note that Article 95’s twenty-percent threshold and seven-day window, combined with Article 63-A’s constraints on individual voting, arguably make it harder to remove a genuinely non-performing government mid-term than to remove one caught in an engineered crisis. That is an asymmetry. Second, the doctrine of necessity, though now discredited, was earnestly defended in its time as a pragmatic response to constitutional deadlock that ordinary mechanisms could not resolve; even the Zafar Ali Shah judgment, while validating a coup, still imposed an election timeline, suggesting its own authors treated it as a bounded exception rather than a template for indefinite rule.[32] Third, the Article 63-A debate reflects a genuine disagreement rather than manufactured controversy: strict enforcement protects governments from purchased defections, but the concern voiced by the dissenting judges in 2022. That judicially nullifying a legislator’s vote intrudes further into the constitutional text than ordinary interpretation allows commands respect from those who prioritise individual legislative conscience over party discipline.[33] Fourth, critics of the 2022 suo motu intervention itself note that an unelected court overriding a Speaker’s procedural ruling is, in its own way, also an extra-parliamentary influence on a government’s fate. A concern in tension with, but not unrelated to, the anxieties this article raises about the Twenty-Sixth Amendment’s curtailment of that same power.
8. TOWARDS DURABLE TENURE SECURITY :
These tensions counsel refinement, not abandonment, of the underlying principle. Four reforms merit consideration.
First, requiring genuine intra-party elections, rather than nomination by a single unelected “party head,” would reduce the personalised loyalty structures that make both defection and its punishment so fraught.[34]
Second, Article 63-A’s triggering categories should be settled by constitutional amendment rather than left to oscillating judicial interpretation, since a rule whose meaning depends on the composition of the bench hearing it cannot reliably protect tenure security.
Third, any future narrowing of the judiciary’s Article 184(3) jurisdiction should be weighed against its demonstrated role as a mechanism of last resort in 2022, ideally alongside clearer, self-executing constitutional triggers that reduce reliance on judicial intervention in the first place.
Fourth, cross-party pacts of the kind attempted in the 2006 Charter of Democracy under which the Pakistan People Party and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) pledged not to seek the military’s help to come to power or to dislodge each other’s governments deserve renewed attention as a political, rather than purely legal, safeguard against establishment-engineered removals.[35]
9. THE CONCLUSION :
Pakistan’s Constitution already answers the question this article poses: an elected government may fall only through resignation, a lawful vote of no-confidence, or a properly advised dissolution subject to judicial scrutiny and never through martial law, a manipulated procedural ruling, or an externally choreographed “in-house change.” The judiciary’s journey from Dosso to Sindh High Court Bar Association shows that this principle can be vindicated, and the 2022 crisis shows that it still can be. But the same period’s reversal on Article 63-A and the Twenty-Sixth Amendment’s curtailment of suo motu jurisdiction are reminders that constitutional safeguards are only as durable as the institutions and the political will that sustain them. Securing the five-year mandate is therefore less a matter of writing new rules than of protecting, consistently and regardless of which party currently benefits, the rules Pakistan already has.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Legislation
Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973
Constitution (Eighth Amendment) Act 1985
Constitution (Thirteenth Amendment) Act 1997
Constitution (Seventeenth Amendment) Act 2003
Constitution (Eighteenth Amendment) Act 2010
Constitution (Twenty-Sixth Amendment) Act 2024
Cases
The State v Dosso PLD 1958 SC 533
Asma Jilani v Government of the Punjab PLD 1972 SC 139
Begum Nusrat Bhutto v Chief of Army Staff PLD 1977 SC 657
Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif v President of Pakistan PLD 1993 SC 473
Syed Zafar Ali Shah v General Pervez Musharraf PLD 2000 SC 869
Sindh High Court Bar Association v Federation of Pakistan PLD 2009 SC 879
Suo Motu Case No 1 of 2022, PLD 2022 SC 574
Presidential Reference No 1 of 2022, PLD 2022 SC 488
Supreme Court Bar Association v Federation of Pakistan, Civil Review Petitions in Presidential Reference No 1 of 2022 (Supreme Court of Pakistan, 3 October 2024)
Secondary Sources
‘Explainer: Pakistan’s Main Political Parties’ Al Jazeera (Doha, 6 May 2013)
‘Timeline: Major Political Events from 2008–2013’ Dawn (Karachi, 16 March 2013)
‘No-Confidence Vote: Legal Minds Answer Procedural Questions’ The Express Tribune (Karachi, 24 October 2022)
‘Pakistan Political Crisis: Justice will Prevail in Pakistan, says Shehbaz Sharif’ Deccan Herald (10 April 2022)
Imtiaz Ahmad, ‘The 18th Amendment and the Demise of Article 58(2)(B): Transforming Pakistan’s Democratic Landscape’ (2025) Annual Methodological Archive Research Review
L Ali Khan, ‘Constitutional Wrangling Over No-Confidence Motion Against Pakistan Prime Minister’ JURIST (14 March 2022)
‘Pakistan: SC Says Dismissal of No-Trust Motion, Dissolution of Assemblies Subject to Court Order’ The Wire (3 April 2022)
‘Pakistan: Supreme Court Issues Detailed Judgment on Dismissal of Resolution of No-Confidence Motion Against Then-PM Imran Khan’ Library of Congress Global Legal Monitor (7 August 2022)
‘Article 63-A: SC Decides Defecting Lawmakers’ Votes will not be Counted’ Dawn (17 May 2022)
‘In Major Relief to Govt, SC Strikes Down 2022 Ruling on Defection Clause under Article 63-A’ Dawn (3 October 2024)
‘Pakistan Dispatch: Supreme Court Reversal of Article 63-A Ruling amid Controversy over Constitutional Amendments’ JURIST (3 October 2024)
‘What is the 26th Constitutional Amendment?’ Dawn (21 October 2024)
International Commission of Jurists, ‘Pakistan: 26th Constitutional Amendment is a Blow to the Independence of the Judiciary’ (24 October 2024)
Nauman Reayat, ‘Compliance with Supreme Court Judgments in Politically Important Cases by Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes: Lessons from Pakistan’ (2025) Asian Journal of Law and Society
‘Benazir & Nawaz Sign Charter of Democracy’ Dawn (Lahore, 15 May 2006)
[1] ‘Explainer: Pakistan’s Main Political Parties’ Al Jazeera (Doha, 6 May 2013); ‘Timeline: Major Political Events from 2008–2013’ Dawn (Karachi, 16 March 2013).
[2]Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, art 52.
[3]ibid art 105.
[4]Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, art 95(1).
[5]ibid art 95(2).
[6]ibid art 94; ‘No-Confidence Vote: Legal Minds Answer Procedural Questions’ The Express Tribune (Karachi, 24 October 2022).
[7]‘Pakistan Political Crisis: Justice will Prevail in Pakistan, says Shehbaz Sharif’ Deccan Herald (10 April 2022).
[8]Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, art 58(1).
[9]ibid art 58(2)(b), as inserted by the Constitution (Eighth Amendment) Act 1985.
[10]Imtiaz Ahmad, ‘The 18th Amendment and the Demise of Article 58(2)(B): Transforming Pakistan’s Democratic Landscape’ (2025) Annual Methodological Archive Research Review; Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif v President of Pakistan PLD 1993 SC 473.
[11]Constitution (Thirteenth Amendment) Act 1997; Constitution (Seventeenth Amendment) Act 2003; Constitution (Eighteenth Amendment) Act 2010.
[12]Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, art 63A.
[13]L Ali Khan, ‘Constitutional Wrangling Over No-Confidence Motion Against Pakistan Prime Minister’ JURIST (14 March 2022).
[14]Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, art 184(3).
[15]The State v Dosso PLD 1958 SC 533.
[16]Begum Nusrat Bhutto v Chief of Army Staff PLD 1977 SC 657.
[17]Syed Zafar Ali Shah v General Pervez Musharraf PLD 2000 SC 869.
[18]Asma Jilani v Government of the Punjab PLD 1972 SC 139.
[19]Sindh High Court Bar Association v Federation of Pakistan PLD 2009 SC 879.
[20]‘Pakistan: SC Says Dismissal of No-Trust Motion, Dissolution of Assemblies Subject to Court Order’ The Wire (3 April 2022).
[21]ibid.
[22]Suo Motu Case No 1 of 2022, PLD 2022 SC 574; ‘Pakistan: Supreme Court Issues Detailed Judgment on Dismissal of Resolution of No-Confidence Motion Against Then-PM Imran Khan’ Library of Congress Global Legal Monitor (7 August 2022).
[23]Deccan Herald (n 7).
[24]Presidential Reference No 1 of 2022, PLD 2022 SC 488; ‘Article 63-A: SC Decides Defecting Lawmakers’ Votes will not be Counted’ Dawn (17 May 2022).
[25]ibid (Miankhel and Mandokhail JJ, dissenting).
[26]Supreme Court Bar Association v Federation of Pakistan, Civil Review Petitions in Presidential Reference No 1 of 2022 (Supreme Court of Pakistan, 3 October 2024); ‘In Major Relief to Govt, SC Strikes Down 2022 Ruling on Defection Clause under Article 63-A’ Dawn (3 October 2024).
[27]‘Pakistan Dispatch: Supreme Court Reversal of Article 63-A Ruling Amid Controversy Over Constitutional Amendments’ JURIST (3 October 2024).
[28]Constitution (Twenty-Sixth Amendment) Act 2024; ‘What is the 26th Constitutional Amendment?’ Dawn (21 October 2024).
[29]International Commission of Jurists, ‘Pakistan: 26th Constitutional Amendment is a Blow to the Independence of the Judiciary’ (24 October 2024).
[30]Nauman Reayat, ‘Compliance with Supreme Court Judgments in Politically Important Cases by Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes: Lessons from Pakistan’ (2025) Asian Journal of Law and Society 1.
[31]ibid.
[32]Syed Zafar Ali Shah v General Pervez Musharraf (n 17).
[33]Dawn (n 24).
[34]L Ali Khan (n 13).
[35]‘Benazir & Nawaz Sign Charter of Democracy’ Dawn (Lahore, 15 May 2006).
