Pakistan’s Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) on Thursday reaffirmed the principle of finality of judgments, dismissing a review petition in a long-running land acquisition dispute involving the Multan Development Authority (MDA).
A two-member bench led by Chief Justice Aminuddin Khan and comprising Justice Ali Baqar Najafi ruled that the petitioners could not reopen a matter that had already been settled through the country’s judicial system.
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The case was filed by the legal heirs of Syeda Nasreen Zohra, who sought to challenge a previous Supreme Court ruling related to compensation in land acquisition proceedings involving the Punjab government’s Communication and Works Department and the MDA.
In a seven-page judgment authored by the chief justice, the court emphasized that the Constitution does not allow endless litigation. It warned that permitting repeated challenges to settled cases through constitutional petitions would undermine the legal system.
“If such a course were sanctioned, it would render review jurisdiction redundant and destabilise the doctrine of finality,” the judgment stated, stressing that judicial discipline requires an end point to legal disputes.
The court examined whether a review petition challenging a Supreme Court judgment under Article 184(3) of the Constitution—now replaced by Article 175E(3) following the 27th Constitutional Amendment—was maintainable. The bench concluded that the case did not involve issues of public importance or the enforcement of fundamental rights for the wider public.
Instead, the dispute was described as a private matter concerning compensation claims between the landowner’s legal representatives and the provincial government.
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The Federal Constitutional Court also cited several land dispute, including the 1988 Benazir Bhutto case, the 2011 Watan Party case and the 2015 District Bar Association Rawalpindi case, to underline that constitutional jurisdiction cannot be used as an appellate forum.
The ruling reinforces the judiciary’s stance that concluded cases cannot be repeatedly reopened under the guise of constitutional enforcement.