Article 9A And the Enforcement Paradox: How the 26th Amendment Created a Right Without Remedy
Author: M. Hasnain Sajjad
Abstract
In October 2024, the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was amended with the addition of Article 9A, which is the first explicit constitutional right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in Pakistan. The paper asserts that the provision is structurally unenforceable – that is, that it cannot be enforced without the help of other provisions of the amendment – but that the unenforceability of the provision is not an accident but a direct consequence of the amendment which created it. The paper analyses this doctrinally, and finds three failures to be intertwined: the simultaneous limitation of the Supreme Court’s Suo Motu powers under Article 184(3), and the complete lack of implementing legislation to make the right operational, and also the various provincial environmental jurisdictions that have emerged as a result of the devolution under the 18th Amendment, which do not provide a coherent alternative. In light of the comparative analysis of the Indian and South African Constitution as well as that of the European Court of Human Rights, the paper shows that, constitutionally speaking, there is a need for institutional structures to ensure that the environmental rights guaranteed by the Constitution are actually enforced and that Pakistan’s Article 9A, which is normatively important, lacks, to date, the legislative framework and the judicial access structure to become an enforceable guarantee of environmental rights.
Keywords
Article 9A, 26th Constitutional Amendment, Environmental Rights, Judicial Enforcement, Suo Motu Jurisdiction, Structural Unenforceability, Climate Litigation, Pakistan Constitutional Law, Implementing Legislation, Fundamental Rights.
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DOI: 10.52279/jlss.08.02.182194 | 182-194 | PDF