Constitution for future generations only.

The sentence 'Constitution is an organic document that is to be interpreted with a mind to the future generations to come' is one of the cannon in the judicial arsenal that is more often than is necessary applied in interpreting the Constitution by the Supreme Court. The organic assessment of the Constitution has become a euphemism for validating a judicially active interpretation of the Constitution, justifying a form of construction concerned with the result founded on individual judges' subjective moralities, as opposed to the means employed for reaching that conclusion. The development of Constitutional jurisprudence predicated on ensuring reaching ends and forsaking critical assessment of the means employed to reach those ends have consequently served to abridge and encumber the right of political representation in Pakistan.

No part of the Constitution has experienced a more morally zealous interpretation than Article 62(1-f). Take, for example, the case of Samiullah Baloch v Abdul Karim Nousherwani PLD 2018 SC 405, colloquially referred to as the 'lifetime disqualification case', in which the Supreme Court declared that any member of Parliament caught by the mischief of Article 62 would be disqualified for life. The Supreme Court while coming to this conclusion drew upon the principle that the Constitution was an organic document to be interpreted for times to come. The court's view admitted that the virtues of moral sagaciousness, righteousness, honesty, and trustworthiness contained in Article 62(1-f) are subjective moralities and can hardly be objectively assessed.

Despite the difficulty in objectively assessing a list of open-ended virtues required of a parliamentarian, the court proceeded to impose a perpetual ban on parliamentarians from participating in elections thereby, invented and reading into Article 62(1-f) an onerous punishment by judicial interpretation. The inducement of shunning non-virtuous behaviour, couched in the organic interpretation of the Constitution had presented the Honourable court a doctrinal leeway to import its subjective morality denouncing what it considered to be non-virtuous behaviour and consequently stipulating a punishment unfound in the Constitution, either textually or structurally. The consequence of such moral reasoning would inescapably bind future courts to treat even cases involving inadvertent omission in the declaration of assets at par with intentional and fraudulent misdeclaration of...