IN September 2023, 22-year-old Akram (not his real name) was picked up from his home in Karachi by men in plain clothes. He was blindfolded and taken to a building where he was interrogated and tortured for several days. The interrogators demanded that he confess to crimes and links with criminal gangs.
Akram was then taken to a police station. There, a police officer told him to pay up or else a criminal case would be registered against him. Neither Akram nor his family could afford the bribe. The officer lodged an FIR implicating him for murder and terrorism. Soon after, Akram was charged with murder under the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) and convicted for life by an anti-terrorism court.
During the trial, the prosecution did not allege, let alone present, any evidence to show links between Akram and terrorist activity. On appeal, the Sindh High Court set aside Akram’s conviction on the basis that the prosecution’s evidence against him was insufficient. The high court also noted that the prosecution failed to establish any motive for terrorism.
Akram’s story is similar to that of many others convicted under the ATA. State actors use both illegal means — enforced disappearance — and the legal process under the ATA to imprison mostly poor young men who have no proven connection to any terrorist activity.
The recent anti-terror amendment covers an impermissibly broad and vague range of activities.
The ATA was enacted in 1997 because legislators at the time believed that regular criminal procedures could not cope with the problem of terrorism. They enacted a special law with weaker due process guarantees and harsher penalties compared to regular proceedings under the Penal and Criminal Procedure Codes. For example, the ATA permits remand to an investigating authority for interrogation for up to 30 days at a time, in contrast to the Criminal Procedure Code, which permits remand for a maximum of 15 days.
The ATA also permits the federal government to issue lists of “proscribed persons” suspected of involvement in terrorist activities. These “proscribed persons” are subjected to draconian surveillance and restrictions on their movement.
Vague and over-broad provisions in the ATA itself, as well as its misuse, have rendered the law an ineffective tool against terrorism. Law enforcement and courts have misinterpreted the ATA since it was passed to cover crimes that should not be deemed terrorism.
In 2020, a seven-member bench of the Supreme Court observed that courts have consistently interpreted as terrorism crimes driven by personal motives rather than political or ideological goals. The Supreme Court clarified that a crime, however heinous, should not be deemed terrorism only because its effect is to create fear and insecurity in society at large. The primary motivation behind that act must be to create terror in wider society.
The Supreme Court declared that the definition of terrorism contained in the ATA 1997 is “too wide” and this “puts an extra and unnecessary burden” on special anti-terrorism courts. It recommended that parliament replace the existing definition with a “more succinct definition bringing it in line with the international perspectives of that offence”.
Rather than address these problems with the law and its implementation, our legislators continue to expand the scope of the ATA and the powers that it confers on law enforcement.
A recent amendment to the ATA allows the authorities to preventively detain a person for three months without charge if they believe the person is “concerned” with any offence under the Act related to the “security or defence of Pakistan” or “public order relating to target killing, kidnapping for ransom, and extortion, bhatta, or the maintenance of supply or services …”
Preventive detention, used against persons anticipated to commit subversive activity must be used very sparingly and be circumscribed by strong, rigorously enforced procedural protections. Renowned civil liberties lawyer and scholar David Cole maintains that preventive detention should only be used against those engaged in armed conflict against the state. Even terrorist acts outside armed conflict should be treated as crimes and subject to all due process requirements of criminal prosecution.
Pakistan’s Constitution permits preventive detention in certain circumstances. The preventive detention provisions in Article 10 of Pakistan’s Constitution are similar to that of India’s constitution. When members of India’s constituent assembly objected to the draft provision allowing preventive detention, the justification provided by the chief framer of India’s constitution, B.R. Ambedkar, was telling: “We do not know how the situation in this country will develop what would be the circumstances which would face the country …. whether the people and parties in this country would behave in a constitutional manner in the matter of getting hold of power, or whether they would resort to unconstitutional methods for carrying out their purposes.”
The rationale behind the permitting of preventive detention, therefore, was to address the risk of constitutional subversion in a newly independent country.
The recent ATA amendment covers an impermissibly broad and vague range of activities. It permits preventive detention for persons “concerned with” criminal activities (target killings, kidnappings and extortion) that would not fall in the category of terrorism let alone the even narrower set of acts amounting to subversion of the constitutional order or armed conflict.
While the amendment is almost guaranteed to enable due process violations, it will not deter terrorism. A similar amendment was made to the law in 2014, which lapsed in 2016. Parliament has now reintroduced preventive detention without any evidence that the earlier provision helped curb terrorism.
An even more recent amendment to the ATA by the Balochistan Assembly that effectively permits secret trials for some suspects is further evidence that the state wants to undermine due process through anti-terror laws. The stories of Akram and many others imprisoned under ATA illustrate that rather than preserve the rule of law, anti-terror laws in Pakistan are used as an extension of the state’s extrajudicial acts to further state repression.
The writer is a lawyer. She is the author of Progressive Laws in Patriarchal Societies (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Published in Dawn, October 2nd, 2025
