LAHORE –The special parliamentary committee has nominated Justice Yahya Afridi as chief justice with a two-thirds majority.
Justice Yahya Afridi was born on January 23, 1965, in Dera Ismail Khan. He completed his early education at Aitchison College, Lahore, and graduated from Government College, Lahore. He holds an MA in Economics from Punjab University, Lahore, and also obtained an LLM degree from Jesus College, Cambridge University, under the Commonwealth Scholarship.
Justice Yahya Afridi began his legal practice as a lawyer in the High Court in 1990 and started practicing as a Supreme Court lawyer in 2004. He also served as the Assistant Advocate General for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
In 2010, he was appointed as an Additional Judge of the Peshawar High Court and was made a permanent judge on March 15, 2012. On December 30, 2016, Justice Yahya Afridi took the oath as Chief Justice of the Peshawar High Court and was appointed as a judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan on June 28, 2018.
Justice Yahya Afridi has presided over various cases in the superior judiciary and was part of a larger bench regarding the reserved seats of the Sunni Ittehad Council, where he also penned a dissenting note in the judgment. Additionally, he was a member of the nine-member larger bench of the Supreme Court addressing the presidential reference against the execution of former Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.
Recently, Justice Yahya Afridi declined to be part of the three-member judges’ committee for the Supreme Court Practice and Procedure Ordinance 2024.