LAST month, at its 49th meeting, the Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan, chaired by the chief justice, recommended establishing an ‘International Commercial Court of Pakistan’ through a new Article 212A in the Constitution. Its stated aims — swift resolution of commercial disputes, stronger enforcement of arbitral awar­­ds, investor confidence, and Pakistan as a credible destination for capital — are exactly right, and I welcome the ambition. But as one who has spent years close to this work, I must say plainly that the court as proposed cannot fly. It will not fail for want of a fine building or good rules, but for three reasons that lie beneath it. The first is that our courts no longer command the legitimacy such a forum requires. The second is that the arbitration law it would sit above is archaic and unworkable. The third is that we have already built an overlapping forum, and it has failed.

First: a court is only as trusted as the system around it.

A court draws its power not from the statute that creates it but from the confidence of those who use it — the belief that its judges are independent and its outcomes cannot be arranged by whoever holds power outside the courtroom. That confidence has been shaken. The 26th Amend­ment of 2024 ended the convention by which the senior-most judge became chief justice and left judges a minority on the body that appoints them; the 27th Amendment of 2025 created a Federal Constitutional Court that absorbed the Supreme Court’s core jurisdiction. It is now widely percei­v­­ed, at home and abroad, that our courts have be­­come managed — and perception is the very........

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