Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani has resigned as a judge of the Lahore High Court (LHC), telling President Asif Ali Zardari in his resignation letter that he can no longer serve on the bench in “conscience” because the 26th and 27th Constitutional Amendments have let the executive tighten its grip over the judiciary, Dawn reported on Wednesday.
Justice Kayani, 56, was elevated to the Islamabad High Court (IHC) in December 2015 and was widely seen as a future IHC chief justice before he was transferred to the Lahore High Court in April this year. In his letter, he said the amendments had “compromised the independence and institutional integrity of the high courts” and that he had personally “witnessed what I regard as the executive’s growing control over judicial institutions” — a trend he said had “seriously eroded public confidence in judicial independence.”
“My conscience does not permit me to continue on the bench. The time has come for me to lay down my robes and return to legal practice,” Justice Kayani wrote, adding that the ordinary litigant remains “the principal stakeholder in the justice system” even as, in his view, other actors have become “beneficiaries of a system intended to serve them.”
The resignation caps a running dispute that has shadowed Justice Kayani for more than two years:
- March 2024: Kayani was one of six IHC judges who wrote to the Supreme Judicial Council alleging interference by intelligence agencies in judicial affairs, including surveillance of judges’ homes.
- April 2026: The Judicial Commission of Pakistan approved the inter-high-court transfer of IHC Chief Justice Sardar Muhammad Sarfraz Dogar and two other judges, a move Kayani himself challenged; the Supreme Court’s constitutional bench later upheld the transfers.
- Mid-2026: Kayani and fellow senior IHC judges separately challenged Dogar’s administrative powers, alleging roster assignments had become a one-man “monocracy.”
- Following his own transfer to the LHC: Kayani lost seniority, dropping to the lower end of the Lahore bench’s list, according to Dawn, while Samaa reported him 10th on the LHC seniority roll.
- Late October 2026: Days before resigning, he was posted to a single bench at the LHC’s Rawalpindi registry, a roster assignment running into December.
- Wednesday, October 28, 2026: Kayani submitted his resignation, with a copy sent to the President.
Justice Kayani said he has disposed of more than 23,000 cases over his career and intends to return to legal practice, focusing on litigant rights and legal awareness. His scheduled retirement was not due until February 2032. Neither the government, the President’s office, nor the Lahore High Court had issued any formal response to the resignation by the time of publication.
Wednesday’s resignation is not an isolated episode. Almost a year earlier, on November 13, 2025, two Supreme Court judges — Justice Mansoor Ali Shah and Justice Athar Minallah — resigned within hours of Parliament passing constitutional changes that created a new Federal Constitutional Court, with judges appointed by the prime minister, running alongside the Supreme Court. Justice Shah wrote at the time that the changes “subjugate the judiciary to executive control,” language that closely echoes Justice Kayani’s resignation letter now. A separate Lahore High Court judge, Justice Raheel Kamran Sheikh, had also resigned in early September this year, though he cited a wish to pursue legal research rather than institutional concerns.
Our Opinion
A sitting judge resigning in protest is meant to be rare precisely because it signals something has broken in the normal checks that keep courts independent, and the fact that Pakistan has now seen this happen at both the Supreme Court and a high court within the span of a year — each citing the same cluster of constitutional amendments — is a pattern too consistent to wave away as isolated personal decisions; without dismissing the possibility that individual service disputes and seniority grievances also played a role here, the institutions responsible for safeguarding judicial independence, from the Judicial Commission to Parliament itself, owe the public a clearer account of why senior judges keep concluding that remaining on the bench is no longer compatible with their conscience.
