Judiciary of Pakistan
hierarchical system with two classes of courts
The judiciary of Pakistan is the national system of courts that maintains the law and order in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Pakistan uses a common law system, which was introduced during the colonial era, influenced by local medieval judicial systems based on religious and cultural practices. The Constitution of Pakistan lays down the fundamentals and working of the Pakistani judiciary.
Pakistan has two classes of courts: the superior (or higher) judiciary and the subordinate (or lower) judiciary. The superior judiciary is composed of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, the Federal Shariat Court, Federal Constitutional Court and five High Courts, with the Supreme Court at the apex. There is a High Court for each of the four provinces as well as the federal capital. The Constitution of Pakistan entrusts the superior judiciary with the obligation to preserve, protect and defend the constitution. The autonomous and disputed territories of Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir have separate judicial systems from the main Pakistani system.
The independence of the Pakistani judiciary has changed over time. Whereas the judiciary used to defer to the Pakistani military, which is a dominant actor in Pakistan's politics, the judiciary has increasingly competed with and confronted the military.
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This entry incorporates text from “Judiciary of Pakistan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.