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Pakistan’s Supreme Court to Purify Parliamentarians

For roughly sixty years, by means political, military, and media, Pakistan’s political elite has curbed the Supreme Court from snooping around in their affairs. Corruption flourished. Then came the...

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Save the Constitution!

In the late evening hours of June 25th 1975, Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister, rushed a letter to the president of India. In this letter Mrs Gandhi alerted the president that “information has...

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FATA’s fate in Pakistan 

On May 25th 2018, Pakistan’s senate passed a constitutional amendment that merges the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) – a patch of mountainous land snaking along parts of the Afghan border –...

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Being Gay under India’s Constitution

Being homosexual in India is like having studied abroad. It gives the speaker a permeant topic of conversation. But consensual gay sex is illegal in India – it has been, ever since the British hastily...

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Mango Scented Sovereignty: Pakistan’s Chief Justice Saqib Nisar and Baba-justice

The Supreme Court’s primary role is to shield citizens from the abuses of sovereign power, scribbled Alexander Hamilton in an essay with the clunky title The Federalist No. 78. In itself, the Court...

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Murder in the Name of Allah: Asia Bibi and Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law

“Every time a lower court sentences someone to death for insulting the Prophet, the Supreme Court eventually jumps in and lets the wrongdoer off death row,” Afzal Qadri, an old man with a greyish...

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To Catch a Spy: India v. Pakistan at the ICJ

Court encounters between Pakistan and India usually entail twenty-two sweaty men batting and jumping after a cricket ball in stadiums financed with Saudi oil-money. This time around however, the court...

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“Twenty Years of Selfless Service”: The Unmaking of India’s Chief Justice

Ranjan Gogoi is a man of firsts. When he took the oath as India’s Chief Justice on 3 October 2018, he was the first Assamese to do so; the first sworn in by a dalit (former untouchable caste)...

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Kashmir: A Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy

In the mid 19th century, sovereignty was transactional. This held particularly true for colonial enterprises. The British, for instance, auctioned off large chunks of conquered land to rich merchants....

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How Old is 14 Really? On Child Marriage and Case-by-Case Justice

In 2011, German authorities put a sudden halt to the six-months grace period during which minors could continue to use driving licenses acquired abroad. Until then, kids fortunate enough to get their...

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Pakistan’s Reluctant Constitutionalism

Not too long ago, a middle-aged Pashtun guava seller in one of Lahore’s upscale markets, dressed in what cosmopolitan fashionistas will eventually appropriate as Taliban street-chic, whispered to me in...

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Afghanistan’s Constitution between Sharia Law and International Human Rights

In February 2006, the 41-year old Afghan national Abdul Rahman was arrested in Kabul. Rahman’s family had reported him to the authorities. In an emotionally charged interview some days after the arrest...

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How not to Divorce Muslim Women in India

Five years ago, during an extended tea break in Cambridge’s architecturally underwhelming University Library, a grad school friend of mine observed that her research topic, the Uniform Civil Code in...

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Privacy and the Indian Supreme Court

Privacy, in something close to its current form, first appeared as a concept in the nineteenth century, the invention of Western legists, who, as the world recovered from enlightenment’s birth pangs,...

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Four Indian Supreme Court Judges Accuse the Chief Justice of Wrongdoing

‘The administration of the court is not in order!’, fumed Jasti Chelameswar of the Indian Supreme Court on 12 January, 2018, from the lawn of his luxuriant Lutyen’s bungalow, where the occasional...

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