Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khosa, who will be sworn in as the 26th chief justice of Pakistan on Friday (January 18), was born on December 21, 1954 in Dera Ghazi Khan. He is married with two daughters and four grandchildren.
Justice Khosa’s brothers are former bureaucrat Nasir Mahmood Khosa and former inspector general of police (IGP) of Balochistan Tariq Masood Khosa.
The judge, who is now 64 years old, received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Punjab and his LLM degree from Queens College at Cambridge in 1978.
He enrolled as an advocate at the Lahore High Court in 1979, and then at the Supreme Court in 1985. As an advocate, he conducted over 600 cases. On February 18, 2010, Justice Khosa was elevated to the position of a Supreme Court judge.
Justice Khosa, over a period of more than 19-and-a-half years, has decided about 55,000 cases.
A special bench headed by Justice Khosa has decided over 10,000 cases of a criminal nature since 2014, according to an article published by The Express Tribune last year. “The total number of pending cases in the top court has reached near 40,000 and a few hundreds of criminal cases are left, which is being considered as a landmark achievement of the apex court,” the article read.
‘Poetic justice’
Justice Khosa is known for adding lyrical flair in his observations and judgments — most recently in the landmark Panama papers verdict that de-seated Nawaz Sharif as the prime minister in 2017.
His dissenting note in the split 2:3 verdict — Khosa was among the two who held Nawaz should be disqualified — onApril 20, 2017 began with a reference to the popular 1969 novel ‘The Godfather’ by Mario Puzo in which he pointed out an epigraph by Honore de Balzac selected by the author: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime”, saying that “It is ironical and a sheer coincidence that the present case revolves around that very sentence attributed to Balzac.”
The literary reference became a major talking point as opposition parties, in particular the PTI, latched onto it to drive home the allegations of corruption while PML-N spoke out against the choice of analogy.
Nawaz was subsequently disqualified under Articles 62 and 63 of the Constitution in July the same year. Source. Dawn.com
Saturday, May 9, 2026
