President Asif Ali Zardari on Tuesday approved the appointment of additional judges to five high courts, bringing an end to a weeks-long impasse over judicial appointments that had also prompted proceedings before the Islamabad High Court.

According to a post by the President of Pakistan on X, President Zardari approved the appointment of additional judges to the Lahore, Sindh, Islamabad and Balochistan High Courts, as well as the confirmation of additional judges in the Lahore and Peshawar High Courts.

The president approved the appointment of 10 additional judges to the Lahore High Court (LHC), three to the Sindh High Court (SHC), three to the Islamabad High Court (IHC) and three to the Balochistan High Court (BHC).

He also approved the confirmation of four additional judges of the PHC and one additional judge of the LHC. The President’s Office said Zardari had signed all the relevant summaries.

The development came a day after the IHC sought written reports from the federal government and the Ministry of Law on the status of the pending judges’ appointment summaries.

The court had been hearing a petition filed against the delay in approving the Judicial Commission of Pakistan’s recommendations for appointments to the high courts. At Monday’s hearing, the IHC had directed the government to explain when the summaries were forwarded to the president and what action had been taken on them.

Background

The latest legal challenge came against the backdrop of an increasingly contentious constitutional debate over the president’s role in judicial appointments. President Zardari had neither approved the Judicial Commission’s recommendations nor returned the summary with objections, prompting questions over whether the Constitution permitted an indefinite delay in acting on judicial appointments.

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The federal government was also considering approaching the superior judiciary to seek a constitutional interpretation of the matter. While the Supreme Court (SC) had previously ruled that the president did not have the authority to reject nominations made by the Judicial Commission, Article 175A(8) of the Constitution did not prescribe a timeframe within which the president had to act on the recommendations.

In its meetings on July 20 and 21, the Judicial Commission had recommended the appointment of three additional judges to the IHC, 10 to the LHC, three to the SHC and three to the BHC. It had also recommended the confirmation of four additional judges of the PHC and a six-month extension in the tenure of SHC Additional Judge Justice Khalid Hussain Shahani.

However, Justice Shahani’s tenure expired on July 28 before the recommended extension took effect.

Legal experts believed the impasse could ultimately require judicial intervention, particularly on the broader constitutional question of whether a statutory or constitutional deadline should govern presidential action on Judicial Commission recommendations.

Government officials had privately linked the delay to dissatisfaction within the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) over the outcome of the Judicial Commission’s recent meetings. According to officials, the party’s preferred nominees for the SHC had failed to secure the commission’s backing, with both judicial and executive members reportedly agreeing that no candidate below the age of 45 should have been appointed.

PPP leader and Judicial Commission member Senator Farooq H Naek had proposed 33 candidates for appointments across the four high courts. However, commission members had said the party could have secured appointments for other candidates had it not insisted on two preferred nominees for the SHC.