After serving for more than 10 years as a Supreme Court judge, including a brief tenure as the CJP, Jillani retired as the top judge on July 10, 2014, according to Geo News.

74-year-old Justice (retired) Jillani was born on July 6, 1949. He did his LLB from the University of Punjab and started practicing law at the

Multan district courts in 1974.

Jillani became an apex court lawyer in 1983. He was sworn in as the Lahore High Court judge in August 1994. And after ten years was elevated as a SC judge in July 2004.

He served as the top court judge till imposition of the state of emergency in November 2007. He then again took oath as the SC judge in 2008. He was appointed as the chief justice of Pakistan in 2013.

In August 2023, the ex-CJP received the 2023 American Bar Association (ABA) International Human Rights Award, in recognition of “his courageous judgments against political impunity in a time of crisis and for defending judicial independence” in Pakistan.

He was also awarded the 2020 J Clifford Wallace Award by the J Reuben Clark Law Society (JRCLS) to honour his “extraordinary career as a judge and a jurist”.

Known to be a “balanced” judge, Justice Jillani delivered key rulings of great significance on domestic and international concerns.

These include his judgments enforcing fundamental rights, gender equality, declaring the right to education a fundamental right, holding that in an age of globalised inter-dependence, dual nationality should be permitted, laying down guidelines for qualitative improvement in legal and medical education, both in the Lahore High Court and the apex court.

However, perhaps, the two rulings that brought him to the foreground were the right of an adult woman to marry a person of her choice in Islam and his landmark ruling on minority rights in 2014, after he took suo moto notice of the matter of the protection of minorities, following a blast in a church in Peshawar that claimed 81 lives.