States of exception: what the Constitution, 3 court rulings and 50 years say about the KP emergency
Dawn · Asad Rahim Khan ·
Every player in this emergency has been on the other side of it before. The courts remember, even if they don’t.
‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,’ wrote the notorious German thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922. Or, put simply, whoever gets to decide when the rules stop applying is the one actually in charge.
Gifted with a big brain and sharp turn of phrase, Schmitt went on to become a noted critic of parliament, constitutionalism, and liberal democracy. For a time, the age was also his: in the ’20s back then, much like the ’20s now, such subjects had fallen out of fashion.
But as a much-quoted critique of Mr Schmitt went, ‘His preferred cure turned out to be infinitely worse than the disease.’