The Architecture of Bifurcation: A Structural Analysis of Pakistan's Twenty-Seventh Constitutional Amendment

This report examines the constitutional amendments of 2024-2025 that restructured Pakistan’s apex judiciary. It finds that while the amendments address a genuine institutional problem (docket backlog), they do so through a design that lacks structural protections for judicial independence. Comparative analysis with constitutional courts in Germany, India, and the United States, combined with application of Pakistan’s own basic structure doctrine, suggests that the Federal Constitutional Court, as designed, is more likely to become an instrument of executive control than a bulwark of constitutional review. This represents a fundamental alteration of the Constitution’s salient features and may be vulnerable to challenge under established jurisprudence.