Barrister Naveed Qazi
A Lady Health Worker from Muzaffargarh has done something that takes quiet courage in Pakistan today. She has walked past the provincial authorities she no longer trusts and appealed directly to the Chief Justice of Pakistan for an independent investigation into the killing of her two sons. Her sons, she says, were tortured by police and then murdered in a staged encounter. She does not believe the official version. And given what we know about how these encounters are conducted and how they are subsequently explained, she has every reason not to.
Her appeal is not the cry of a lone, desperate woman making extraordinary allegations against an otherwise clean system. It is the latest voice in a long and growing chorus. Police encounters in Punjab have stopped being exceptional events that occasionally shock the public conscience. They have become, by all available evidence, a routine instrument of law enforcement. What was once sporadic has become systemic. What was once denied is now, disturbingly, defended.
Rights groups and journalists tracking reported incidents have estimated that hundreds of police encounters have taken place in recent months across Punjab alone, resulting in a staggering number of deaths. These are not figures drawn from the imagination of critics. They are derived from documented incidents, official records, and media reports. And what has been the political response? Not accountability. Not inquiry. In several instances, political authorities have publicly praised these killings as an effective way to deter crime. When elected officials stand before cameras and applaud extrajudicial executions as good policing, the message sent down through the system is unmistakable: keep going, you have our backing.
That endorsement is the most dangerous element of this entire crisis. An individual officer who commits a crime out of personal malice or professional laziness is a problem that institutions can theoretically address. But when the political leadership signals tolerance for extrajudicial methods, and when those methods begin to be treated as a legitimate tool of crime control, the institution itself is compromised. It is no longer a question of a few bad actors. It is a question of a system that has decided certain lives are not worth the inconvenience of due process.
The Constitution of Pakistan guarantees every citizen the right to a fair trial. That right does not come with an asterisk that says it applies only to those who seem innocent, or only to those with money, connections, or social standing. It applies universally. The moment the state begins sorting citizens into those who deserve constitutional protection and those who do not, it has crossed a line that no democratic government should ever approach. And once crossed, that line is extraordinarily difficult to walk back.
The police encounter, as practiced in Pakistan, is fundamentally an admission of institutional failure. It says: we cannot investigate properly, we cannot gather evidence reliably, we cannot trust the courts to convict the guilty, and we cannot be bothered to try. The criminal justice system is broken, so we will bypass it altogether. That logic may appeal to those who are impatient with process and want visible results. But the results it produces are not justice. They are the appearance of justice, a simulation of order built on fear, impunity, and the silence of those who know better but say nothing.
The costs of this simulation are not abstract. They are real and they compound over time. Families like the one in Muzaffargarh carry wounds that do not heal. Communities that watch their young men disappear into police custody and emerge only as statistics in an encounter report do not become more cooperative with law enforcement. They become more hostile, more withdrawn, and more convinced that the state is not their protector but their predator. That breakdown in trust makes policing harder, not easier. Encounter killings do not solve the crime problem. They deepen it, while adding a new and uglier problem on top.
The case that has now reached the courts is therefore far larger than one family’s grief, though that grief alone would be sufficient reason to act. It is a test of whether Pakistan’s judiciary is willing to confront a practice that strikes at the foundations of the legal order the courts exist to defend. If the judiciary looks away, or moves with the kind of caution that achieves nothing, it sends its own message. It says that the law has limits, and that those limits coincide conveniently with the preferences of the powerful.
A health worker from Muzaffargarh is asking for justice for her sons. She deserves it. So does every Pakistani who still believes that the law should mean something.
