A Resigned Judge Just Called Out the Federal Constitutional Court by Name. Here's Why.

Pakistan's Federal Constitutional Court spent its first ten months fighting over its own legitimacy. Its first substantive gender-rights ruling has now reopened that fight on different ground — and the person making the argument this time is a retired Supreme Court judge who quit rather than watch the court get built.

The ruling that started it

On September 29, 2026, the FCC set aside a December 2024 Islamabad High Court judgment in a workplace harassment case that had been working through Pakistan's courts since 2012, when a National Bank of Pakistan employee first filed a complaint against two colleagues. The ombudsman's original order was compulsory retirement; the IHC had restored that order in 2024. The FCC went the other way, ruling that the Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act, 2010 requires a sexual element before conduct becomes actionable, and that "merely undesirable, inappropriate or harmful conduct" falls short of that threshold. Citing Article 189 of the Constitution, the bench said plainly that it disagreed with two Supreme Court rulings, from 2021 and 2025, that had read the law more broadly.

Why lawyers call it regressive

The reaction from Pakistan's legal community was fast and specific. Lawyer Reema Omer called it "easily one of the most regressive judgements related to gender-based abuse in recent times," saying it fails victims of harassment, including women. Barrister Maleeha Bokhari pointed out that Parliament itself amended the relevant section of the law in 2022 specifically to cover "discrimination on the basis of gender, which may or may not be sexual in nature" — meaning the FCC's narrower reading cuts against the legislature's own clarification, not just prior case law. Lawyer Aaminah Qadir noted the ruling overrides a Supreme Court judgment written by a female justice "who actually understands, first-hand, that the implications of harassment at work may not always be overtly sexual." Legal observers have warned the precedent could discourage complaints altogether, since it narrows what counts as harassment at the exact moment workplaces are supposed to be getting safer to report in.

A retired judge makes it personal

Five days later, on October 4, retired Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah published an op-ed in Dawn, "The court that could not see," that turned the harassment ruling into an argument about the FCC's legitimacy itself. Shah resigned from the Supreme Court in November 2025, within hours of the 27th Constitutional Amendment being signed into law — the amendment that created the FCC and moved constitutional cases out of the Supreme Court's hands. His resignation letter ran thirteen pages and called the amendment a "grave assault on the Constitution." Nearly a year later, his op-ed argues the FCC's own record now makes the case he made at the time: that its first bench was chosen by the president on the prime minister's advice, bypassing the Judicial Commission, with no published criteria or open assessment of merit, and that a court built that way produced a judgment "rendered without hearing the attorney general or appointing an amicus," and "thin on scholarship and constitutional understanding." He also pointed to practical sweeteners written into the new court's design: salaries set above the Supreme Court's until the Supreme Court's were raised to match, generous staff allowances, and three extra years of tenure for its judges.

The pattern this fits

This isn't the FCC's first fight over its own standing. The court dismissed every petition against the decades-old ban on the Ahmadiyya community's foundational religious text in September, a ruling that drew its own round of criticism from UN experts and international rights groups over how the court weighed a religious-freedom argument. And the FCC's family-law reach came up again just this month, when UN special rapporteurs noted that Pakistan's Federal Constitutional Court, not the Supreme Court, returned Maria Shahbaz to her alleged abductor's custody despite NADRA records confirming she was a minor — a ruling on a different constitutional-bench track that also went against the more protective reading of the law. The harassment ruling now sits alongside both: a pattern, critics argue, of the FCC interpreting rights narrowly in cases where the Supreme Court had been moving the other way. That contrast is sharpest set against the Supreme Court's own ruling three days before the 27th Amendment reshuffled who hears these cases, when a five-judge bench held that a wife's haq mahr is an unconditional right, not a bargaining chip — the kind of expansive reading on gender rights that the FCC's September 29 judgment now cuts against.

What happens next

The workplace harassment ruling itself has no further avenue of appeal within Pakistan's court system — the FCC was built to be the final word on constitutional questions, which is precisely Shah's objection to it. What happens next is institutional rather than legal: whether Parliament revisits the 2022 harassment-law amendment lawyers say the ruling undercuts, whether other FCC benches follow this reading in pending cases, and whether criticism from a sitting former Supreme Court judge adds pressure the lawyers' bar associations haven't been able to generate on their own. None of that reopens this case. It does mean the question Shah's resignation posed in November 2025 — whether a court assembled this way can be trusted with rights the Supreme Court used to decide — now has a concrete ruling attached to it instead of a hypothetical.

Build Better Pakistan's Rights Desk is tracking the Federal Constitutional Court's rulings and will follow up on any legislative or judicial response to the harassment-law criticism.