LAHORE: Justice Shams Mehmood Mirza has resigned as Lahore High Court (LHC) judge due to “personal reasons”, sources said on Saturday.
As per the insiders, Justice Mirza submitted his resignation to President Asif Ali Zardari.
The judge was ranked fifth in seniority at the LHC and also served as a member of its administration committee.
Appointed as an additional judge in 2014, Justice Mirza’s superannuation was scheduled for March 6, 2028.
His resignation comes just two days after the National Assembly passed the 27th Constitutional Amendment, making changes to the judicial structure and military command.
The amended bill fine-tunes the structure of the newly established Federal Constitutional Court (FCC), clarifies the titles and ranking of the country’s top judges, and drops several clauses from the Senate-approved draft that had sought to alter oath-related provisions for various constitutional offices.
The latest move follows the resignations of Supreme Court judges Justice Mansoor Ali Shah and Justice Athar Minallah, who had issued letters strongly criticising the 27th Amendment.
The jurists had criticised the 27th Amendment, describing it as a “grave assault on the Constitution of Pakistan”. However, the federal government called the judges’ resignations “political speeches” and the latter’s allegations “unconstitutional”.
Justice Shah, in his 13-page resignation letter, called the recent constitutional tweak an assault on the Constitution that dismantles the Supreme Court, compromises judicial independence and weakens the country’s constitutional democracy.
He wrote that the amendment, passed “without debate or consultation”, creates an FCC above the Supreme Court and places the judiciary under executive influence, leaving the apex court “truncated and diminished”.
Justice Shah said he could not remain in a court “stripped of its constitutional authority”, adding that continuing would amount to silently accepting a constitutional wrong. He lamented that his hope after the 26th Amendment had now “been extinguished”.
Warning that judicial independence faces “the beginning of the end”, he said nations lose their moral compass when justice is constrained. He thanked colleagues and family, saying resignation was the only honest way to honour his oath.
Justice Minallah, in his resignation letter, rejected the 27th Amendment, saying the Constitution he pledged to defend “no longer exists” and now survives only as a shadow without its spirit.
He wrote that he had warned the chief justice before the amendment’s passage, but his concerns were realised amid “silence and inaction”. Continuing in office, he said, would betray his oath and dishonour the Constitution’s memory.
Reacting to the content of the judges’ resignations, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Political Affairs Rana Sanaullah termed the jurists respectable but accused them of advancing a “political” and “self-serving” agenda, urging them to explain their claim that the Supreme Court had been fractured.
