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De Facto Rule

Legally and politically, Pakistan’s most powerful man should be the country’s prime minister. However, that is only on paper.

By Fathima Sheikh | March 2025


Very few countries operate as democracies, and even fewer as absolute democracies. However, the power of governance tends to navigate through two major practices: de facto and de jure. Inevitably, in South Asia, these two channels of appointment define legislation and control throughout the subcontinent, and although it may seem as though power shifts for the people, seldom does it shift by them.

In Pakistan, the line between De Facto and De Jure seems to have been blurred over the past few years. Recently, the country passed the infamous and highly debated ‘26th Constitutional Amendment Bill’ that has empowered the Parliament to elect the Supreme Court Judge, who will have a fixed three-year term. This final act of suffocating a free judiciary by designating its highest appointment to the Parliament has shifted the axis of what is right and what is true.

Before understanding this distinction, one must first differentiate between De Facto and De Jure—two Latin terms that signify the state of being. De facto, meaning ‘the fact,’ is the recognition of a practice based on its factual reality; one might say that the Prime Minister of Pakistan is the most powerful man in the country.

However, the De facto reality is that the country’s most powerful man is someone else whose point of contact with the political and the public is the most significant and widely reported reality that sets the tone for the country—both nationally and internationally. De jure, consequently, stands for ‘the law.’ It is what is written in the constitution and what the proper procedure by law determines.

Legally and politically, the most powerful man should be the Prime Minister of Pakistan. However, that is only on paper. In Pakistan, what has interestingly happened within the past few years is that De facto practices have seized De jure moralities, so much so that they have begun to synchronize in an almost comically bizarre fashion, and the ink only began to bleed upon the removal of the country’s 22nd Prime Minister, Imran Khan.

In April 2022, Khan exposed the ‘Cypher’ and became the first Pakistani Prime Minister to be removed through a no-confidence vote. Subsequently, that October, he was jailed and disqualified by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) for the ‘Toshakhana Case’; that very November, he survived an assassination attempt. The following year, in May 2023, Khan was arrested under corruption charges and sentenced to three years of prison time.

Despite massive rigging and no symbol to stamp, Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) undoubtedly dominated the voter banks and proclaimed a sweeping victory across the nation. Still, governance remained on an interim hold, and supreme leader Shehbaz Sharif stood in as an interim Prime Minister to govern the nation. Additionally, in 2024, Khan was again sentenced to ten years on the accusation of leaking state secrets and violating the Official Secrets Act, with an added seven years for breaching Islamic marriage laws with his wife.


Throughout 2024, the bitter back and forth between the courts (which favored Khan) and the opposition, which was, at multiple times, taken to the cleaners, resulted in the 26th Amendment Bill passed at approximately midnight by Chief Justice Qazi Faez Isa, who was due to retire just days after. Coincidently, Isa’s successor, Mansoor Ali Shah, who was set to assume the Chief Justice role and had issued favorable verdicts for Khan and the PTI, was no longer set to take the seat.

Surprisingly, midnight seems to be the most effective time for court orders, as it was around the same time the court passed its initial “No Confidence Resolution” against Khan that commenced this fiasco. One might suggest we start filing cases at midnight since our staunchest and most obeyed judgements are approved at that hour.

By design, the entire nation is aware of the debacle that has resulted in the insulting outcome of the 26th Amendment. Coined as a practice that will create efficient and effective outcomes, this Bill is far from that—in fact, it is merely an extension of the power that has now consumed the judiciary, an institution that was once renowned for being its own individual entity for unlike any other office, it did not have extensions or elections. It, in fact, stood as the only remaining symbol of De jure since individuals assumed power by law through merit and practice, not by astute design or malpractice. Now, this, too, has been forced to submit its highest appointment to an unstable Parliament that elects and dissolves under various established powers.

Interestingly so, this begs the question of what is, in fact, De jure and De facto in a country whose political heads have sold their ethics and morality to assume kingship in what we deem a democratic playing field? If De jure is law, and De facto is our reality, what becomes of a country whose institutional autonomy has been usurped to merely dictate governance? Is anyone so virtuous that they possess the right to pass rightful judgements of their own doings? And since Pakistan’s political history follows a broken compass of morality, all needles pointing North accuse the people in power.

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