An Analysis of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s Trial beyond the Acknowledgement of Miscarriage of Justice

Abstract

The trial of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was one of the landmark cases in the history of Pakistan. This case has always been in talk since its beginning. But now the question rises that to what extent the opinion of Supreme Court’s 2024 Judgment affects the legal and constitutional value. This Article seeks to explore how the Supreme Court’s 2024 judgment in Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s case re-examines the fairness of Bhutto’s 1979 trial in light of constitutional and procedural guarantees. This Article tries to go beyond the plain description of judicial bias, and instead puts forward a doctrinal evaluation, in a more organized way, of the 1979 proceedings against the Article 10-A of the Constitution of Pakistan 1973 and the International human rights benchmarks, especially ICCPR Article 14. This Article adopts the doctrinal research methodology. The results indicates that Bhutto’s trial was not just an authoritarian rule. Instead it comes off as a wider kind of systemic procedural breakdown where the statutory steps were used as instruments to undermine the constitutional safeguards. The article suggests that the legacy of the Bhutto’s case may not be limited to historical acknowledgment only, rather it may serve as a basis for developing a stronger constitutional framework for preventing and responding to the miscarriages of justice..