Sunny Masih stood outside a Lahore court for weeks, waiting for someone to tell him why his brother had died. Amir Masih, a gardener, had been picked up over an alleged street crime and taken, his family says, to a private lock-up rather than a police station. He was never produced before a magistrate. The post-mortem later showed broken ribs and bruising across his hands, feet, and back.[1] Nobody in this story disputes that Amir Masih died in police custody. What remains unresolved, years later, is who answers for it.
That story is not unusual in Pakistan, and it is especially familiar in Punjab. It sits at the centre of the question this article tries to answer honestly: why does a country with a constitutional prohibition on torture, a dedicated 2022 statute, and a Supreme Court that keeps restating the same principles still produce cases like Amir Masih’s, year after year?
A problem measured in bodies, not just principle
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) reported that twenty-seven people died in police custody from alleged torture between January and June 2023 alone.[2] A year later, the same six-month window produced twenty more such deaths.[3] These figures sit alongside a documented catalogue of method: beatings with batons and littars (leather straps), legs crushed or stretched with metal rods known as roola, sexual violence, prolonged sleep deprivation, and detainees forced to watch others being tortured.[4] None of this is speculative. It is what Human Rights Watch, the HRCP, and Pakistan’s own courts have documented for decades, under governments of every political stripe.
These are not isolated tragedies scattered evenly across the country. Punjab, home to over half of Pakistan’s population, carries a disproportionate share of them, and the trend has moved sharply in the wrong direction. Between 2018 and 2022, Punjab police recorded 544 “encounters.”[5] From 2020 to 2023, the annual figure stayed under 400. Then, in a single eight-month stretch beginning in late 2025, Punjab’s Crime Control Department (CCD), a specialised unit created under the province’s “Safe Punjab” initiative, was linked to more than 900 deaths in what the HRCP called extrajudicial killings dressed up as encounters.[6] That is more than double the 341 encounter deaths recorded across Punjab and Sindh combined for the whole of the previous year. Lahore alone accounted for 139 of them, Faisalabad 55, and Sheikhupura 47.
Numbers like these tend to flatten into abstraction, so it helps to keep the people attached to them in view. Zubaida Bibi, from Bahawalpur, lost five relatives, including three sons, to separate police encounters across different districts within twenty-four hours of a raid on her home in which officers also took her cash, jewellery, and her daughter’s wedding dowry.[7] The pattern HRCP’s own director has described is specific to Punjab: an “already existing policing culture where there was impunity for torture,” dating back to the 1960s, that later spread to other provinces.[8] A Lahore-based lawyer quoted in the same reporting called encounter killings “a relic of colonial control structures and military dictatorships” that treated citizens as subjects rather than rights-bearing individuals.[9]
Where the practice comes from
None of this began recently, and none of it is accidental. Pakistan inherited its police apparatus, almost unchanged in structure, from a colonial force built to control a subject population rather than to serve citizens who hold enforceable rights against the state. The old Police Rules of 1934 contained no prohibition on torture at all; it took until 2002, under General Musharraf’s government, for the Police Order to introduce the first criminal penalty for it, and even then largely to satisfy domestic political pressure rather than any treaty obligation, since Pakistan had not yet ratified the Convention against Torture at that point.[10]
The investigative method colonial administrators left behind treats confession as the centrepiece of a case rather than as one piece of evidence among several. Physical remand, the period during which a suspect is held by police rather than in judicial custody, exists in law as a narrow tool for gathering specific evidence. In practice it has become the window in which torture happens, in part because the magistrate who signs the remand order rarely asks, and is rarely required to ask, what condition the suspect will be in when that period ends.
This is not a matter of a few rogue officers, and describing it that way lets the system off too easily. One commentator writing for a Pakistani legal outlet made a case worth taking seriously even where it is uncomfortable: that police torture survives not because officers are unusually cruel but because “the criminal justice system does not allow decent and intelligent criminal investigation,” so confession-extraction fills the space that forensic capacity should occupy.[11] The same writer recalled a 1980s state television drama in which the euphemism “drawing room” stood in for the room where a suspect would be beaten, a detail that captures something the statistics cannot: how far this practice has settled into ordinary cultural reference rather than remaining a shameful secret.[12] Where a magistrate grants physical remand more or less automatically, and where a defence lawyer knows a good forensic case is rare, the incentive structure for every actor in the system quietly points toward the interrogation room rather than the laboratory.
What the law actually says
On paper, Pakistan does not lack for prohibitions. Article 14(2) of the Constitution states plainly that “no person shall be subjected to torture for the purpose of extracting evidence.”[13] Article 9 protects the right to life and liberty; Article 10 requires that an arrested person be informed of the grounds for arrest and produced before a magistrate within twenty-four hours; Article 10-A, added by the Eighteenth Amendment in 2010, guarantees a fair trial and due process to everyone, not only at trial but at every stage that precedes it.[14]
Beneath the Constitution, the ordinary criminal statutes fill in some detail, unevenly. The Pakistan Penal Code criminalises the physical acts that often accompany custodial abuse, including criminal force, hurt, wrongful confinement, and, where death results, murder under section 302, but it has never contained a standalone definition of “torture” as such.[15] Section 337-K, inserted through the Qisas and Diyat law in 1990, comes closest: it criminalises causing hurt specifically to extort a confession, carrying a sentence of up to ten years, though it has historically been invoked in only a small fraction of the cases it could plausibly cover.[16] Article 156 of the Police Order 2002 separately penalises vexatious arrest, search, and torture by police officers, and comparable provisions now exist in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police Act 2017 and the Sindh Police Act 2019, the latter of which also created a specific external oversight mechanism absent from Punjab’s own framework.[17]
The most significant recent addition is the Torture and Custodial Death (Prevention and Punishment) Act 2022 (TCDA), which followed years of stalled bills going back to at least 2014 and passed in large part to satisfy conditions attached to the European Union’s GSP+ trade scheme, under which Pakistan’s preferential market access is conditioned on ratifying and implementing twenty-seven international conventions on human rights, labour, and governance.[18] Whatever its immediate political motive, the Act is, on its face, a serious piece of legislation. It defines custodial death broadly enough to capture deaths on private medical premises and during transport in a vehicle;[19] it renders evidence obtained through torture inadmissible in any criminal trial, resolving a debate that had lingered for years over whether a coerced confession could still support a conviction if corroborated by other evidence;[20] it requires a female police officer to be present whenever a woman is questioned or held, and forbids extracting information from a woman outside that safeguard;[21] it creates distinct offences for torture, custodial death, and custodial rape, tied back to the Penal Code’s existing sentencing structure;[22] and it sets firm timelines, requiring investigations to close within thirty days, trials within three weeks, and appeals within thirty days of filing.[23] Section 7 allows for the suspension, transfer, and departmental prosecution of implicated officials, which is a meaningful accountability lever if anyone actually chooses to use it.[24]
The catch sits in section 5. Investigation under the Act is the exclusive jurisdiction of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), a federal body, but the statute imposes no obligation on provincial police to actually refer cases to it.[25] Punjab’s police force, which generates the overwhelming majority of the country’s custodial torture complaints, carries no statutory duty to hand its own alleged abuses to an outside agency for investigation. Predictably, that silence has already produced litigation pending before the Lahore High Court over whether cases are being referred at all.[26]
The international layer
Pakistan signed the UN Convention against Torture (UNCAT) in 2008 and ratified it in 2010, and is separately party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both instruments tracing their lineage to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.[27] Article 2 of UNCAT requires state parties to take effective legislative, administrative, and judicial measures to prevent torture within their jurisdiction, and Article 4 requires that torture be made a criminal offence carrying penalties that reflect its gravity.
For the twelve years between ratification and the 2022 Act, Pakistan sat in plain breach of that specific obligation: it had ratified a convention against torture without criminalising torture as a matter of domestic law, a gap the UN Committee against Torture and the Human Rights Committee both flagged in their concluding observations following Pakistan’s 2017 treaty reviews.[28] The TCDA closed that particular gap. It has not closed the implementation gap, which is a different and considerably harder problem, and one this article returns to below.
What the courts have said
The judiciary’s position has, at least rhetorically, been consistent and often forcefully worded. In Benazir Bhutto v The President of Pakistan, the Supreme Court held that custodial killings and staged encounters cannot be justified by pointing to a suspect’s criminal record, and that the state carries the burden of explaining how and why a person in its custody died, in what circumstances, and whether that death was natural or otherwise.[29] The Court was unambiguous that human dignity is inviolable and that the right to life cannot be taken away except as the law itself provides.
That principle resurfaced almost thirty years later, in August 2025, in Khalid Mehmood and others v The District Police Officer, DG Khan and others. Writing for the Court, Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhail restated that Article 10 requires production before a magistrate within twenty-four hours of arrest, that Article 14 makes dignity and freedom from torture a fundamental right rather than a policy aspiration, and that when “a government functionary harms a person without following the law, this not only constitutes a fundamental rights violation, but also violates due process of law.”[30] The Court went further than earlier judgments in one respect, describing “an effective, dedicated, external oversight of the police force” as a present institutional necessity rather than a distant reform goal.[31]
These are not marginal rulings from a court reluctant to engage with the issue. Taken together with the Supreme Court’s Human Rights Cell, which has continued for years to take up individual torture complaints under the Court’s suo motu jurisdiction under Article 184(3),[32] they show a judiciary that has said, in substance, the same thing since at least 1998 without the institutional machinery beneath it changing very much in the interval. A principle restated in 1998, and again in 2025, is a principle that has still not found its way into the ordinary police station, and that gap between judgment and practice is really the subject of this article.
Why the gap persists
Three structural problems account for most of it. The first is investigative design. Section 5 of the TCDA hands exclusive jurisdiction to the FIA but creates no referral duty for provincial police, and the FIA’s own senior ranks are frequently drawn from the police service it is meant to oversee, a conflict of interest the HRCP has flagged directly in its most recent review of the law.[33] The Commission also noted that although the National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) has been given a formal oversight role under the Act, its supervisory powers remain undefined, which limits its practical ability to conduct independent investigations of its own.[34] An oversight body that shares personnel and reporting lines with the institution it oversees is not, in any functional sense, an oversight body.
The second problem is forensic and investigative capacity. Where police lack the training, laboratories, and time to build a case on physical evidence, confession remains the fastest route to a conviction, and torture remains the fastest route to a confession. Training under the Istanbul Protocol, the international standard for documenting torture through medico-legal examination, exists more as a line item in policy documents than as a routine feature of how medico-legal officers actually examine detainees in Punjab’s district hospitals.
The third is the political economy of the “encounter.” A police force under pressure to show results against organised crime has every institutional incentive to present an extrajudicial killing as evidence of effectiveness rather than as a crime scene, particularly when the standard account of a fatal encounter, drawn from the CCD’s own case files, reads almost identically each time: suspects intercepted “suspiciously,” usually at night or at a roadblock, who allegedly open fire first, forcing police to respond in self-defence.[35] The HRCP has called for a judicial probe into exactly this recurring pattern.[36] Its most recent review of the TCDA also points to a subtler gap: the Act’s definition of torture, while considerably broader than anything Pakistan has had before, still omits purely psychological methods, including threats of death or serious harm, mock executions, threats against family members, and prolonged solitary confinement, all of which fall squarely within the definition of torture Pakistan is bound to under Article 1 of UNCAT.[37]
There is a fourth factor worth naming separately, because it cuts across all three of the above: political interference reaches well beyond ordinary criminal suspects. In August 2022, Shahbaz Gill, a senior official with the then-opposition party PTI, was arrested in Islamabad on sedition charges after remarks made on television. His lawyers and party colleagues alleged he was beaten and otherwise mistreated in custody and denied treatment for an existing asthma condition, allegations the government denied.[38] Whatever the truth of that specific case, the pattern it illustrates is instructive: when torture allegations touch a politically significant detainee, they generate international attention and, occasionally, an inquiry, in a way an anonymous case from a district lock-up in Punjab never will. That asymmetry itself distorts the incentives for reform. A government under domestic and diplomatic pressure over one high-profile allegation has little reason to fix the institutional structure that produces hundreds of unremarked ones every year.
Looking elsewhere for what might actually work
Pakistan is not alone in wrestling with this, and it is worth being honest about what comparable jurisdictions have and have not managed to fix.
The United Kingdom criminalised torture directly under section 134 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, and separately built an evidentiary safeguard into ordinary policing through section 78 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which allows courts to exclude evidence obtained in circumstances that would make its admission unfair, including coercive interrogation.[39] The mechanism that matters most for Pakistan’s purposes, though, is structural rather than statutory. Complaints against police in England and Wales that involve a death or serious injury are subject to mandatory referral to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), a body funded independently of any police force, whose statute bars its Director General and senior leadership from ever having served as a police officer.[40] Whatever its own well-documented shortcomings around delay and communication,[41] the IOPC’s basic design answers precisely the question Pakistan’s 2022 Act leaves open: it does not depend on the police choosing to refer their own alleged abuses to somebody else’s discretion.
India offers a more sobering comparison, and a useful warning against over-relying on judicial guidelines in place of statute. India has never ratified UNCAT, despite signing it in 1997, and still has no standalone anti-torture statute.[42] What it has instead is D.K. Basu v State of West Bengal, in which the Supreme Court of India, responding to a letter from a former High Court judge documenting a pattern of custodial deaths, issued eleven binding guidelines covering how arrests must be recorded, witnessed, and communicated to a detainee’s family, later partly folded into the Code of Criminal Procedure.[43] It is a genuinely useful judicial innovation, and Pakistan’s own courts could adopt something similar without waiting for Parliament. It has also, by India’s own official figures, not stopped custodial deaths from running into the thousands each year, with India’s National Human Rights Commission recording roughly 2,739 such deaths in 2024 alone.[44] That is the clearest evidence available that detailed procedural guidelines, however well drafted, cannot substitute for genuinely independent investigation and real institutional consequences when they are ignored.
The lesson from both comparisons is not that Pakistan needs a different constitutional text. Article 14(2) already says what needs saying, and the 2022 Act already criminalises what needs criminalising. What both point to instead is investigative independence of the kind neither Pakistan’s FIA-based model nor India’s judicially-improvised one has fully achieved: a body that investigates police torture and is neither staffed by police nor answerable to them in the ordinary chain of command.
What would actually change things
A realistic reform agenda has to start from what Pakistan already has rather than propose new architecture that will sit as unused as the last round did. Five changes would matter more than most of what tends to get proposed in the aftermath of a high-profile case.
First, section 5 of the TCDA needs a mandatory referral clause. Provincial police should be under a statutory duty to refer credible torture allegations to the FIA within a fixed number of days, with clear disciplinary consequences for an officer or department that fails to do so, closing the gap the pending Lahore High Court litigation has already exposed.
Second, the FIA’s investigative role in torture cases should sit with officers recruited and trained outside the general police cadre, or with a dedicated unit modelled on the personnel separation the UK maintains between the IOPC and serving police forces. Sharing personnel with the institution under investigation defeats much of the purpose of naming a separate investigator in the statute in the first place.
Third, the definition of torture in the TCDA should be amended to include psychological torture explicitly, in line with the HRCP’s own recommendation, and Pakistan should ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT), which would require an independent national preventive mechanism empowered to inspect detention facilities on a standing basis rather than only after a death has already occurred.[45]
Fourth, the National Commission for Human Rights’ oversight role under the TCDA needs statutory clarity rather than the vague supervisory language currently in the Act, so that its findings carry consequences rather than remaining advisory.
Fifth, and least glamorous but arguably most important, magistrates need to treat a remand application as a genuine judicial decision rather than a formality. The Code of Criminal Procedure already vests magistrates with considerable power to refuse or condition physical remand; the problem is not an absence of legal tools but a practice of exercising them without much scrutiny.[46] Article 10’s twenty-four-hour production requirement protects a suspect only if the magistrate receiving that suspect actually asks, and is trained to ask, what condition they are in and why, and is willing to record an answer that displeases the investigating officer standing in front of them.
Sixth, none of the above works without money behind it. Forensic laboratories, Istanbul Protocol training for medico-legal officers, and a functioning witness protection regime under section 14 of the TCDA all cost more than passing a statute does, and Pakistan’s provinces have historically funded police expansion far more generously than they have funded the forensic and prosecutorial capacity that would make torture unnecessary as an investigative shortcut. A reform agenda that stops at drafting better law, without a matching budget line, will read exactly like the 2022 Act has so far: a serious piece of paper sitting alongside an unchanged police station.
A closing thought
None of this is really a matter of Pakistan lacking the right words. The Constitution has the words. The 2022 Act has the words. The Supreme Court, twice across three decades, has said the words with genuine force. What Punjab’s custodial torture record shows, most starkly in the CCD figures of the past year, is that a right on paper protects nobody until an institution exists that is willing, and structurally able, to enforce it against the very officers who might otherwise be left to investigate themselves. Until that changes, the distance between the law as written and the law as practised in a Lahore lock-up will keep being measured, as it has been for Sunny Masih and for Zubaida Bibi’s family, in bodies rather than in judgments.
Bibliography
Legislation
Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973
Pakistan Penal Code 1860
Police Order 2002
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police Act 2017
Sindh Police Act 2019
Torture and Custodial Death (Prevention and Punishment) Act 2022
Criminal Justice Act 1988 (UK)
Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (UK)
UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment 1984
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948
Cases
Benazir Bhutto v The President of Pakistan PLD 1998 SC 388
Khalid Mehmood and others v The District Police Officer, DG Khan and others 2026 SCLR 21
D.K. Basu v State of West Bengal AIR 1997 SC 610
Secondary Sources
Adil, Kamran, ‘Torture Law and The Criminal Justice System in Pakistan’ (RSIL, 2 May 2024)
Human Rights Watch, ‘Pakistan: Make Torture a Crime’ (23 August 2022)
House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, Report on the Independent Office for Police Conduct (1 March 2022)
Independent Office for Police Conduct, ‘About Us’ (policeconduct.gov.uk)
Ministry of Human Rights, Government of Pakistan, Report under the Convention Against Torture
OMCT, ‘Global Torture Index 2025: India Factsheet’ (2025)
‘About Custodial Torture’ The News on Sunday (Dialogue)
‘HRCP Flags Gaps in Anti-Torture Law and Custodial Abuse, Demands Reforms’ Express Tribune (Karachi, 2026)
‘Pakistan’s Punjab Police Kill 900 People in Eight Months: What’s Going On?’ Al Jazeera (18 February 2026)
‘SC Affirms State’s Duty to Protect Right to Life, Prevent Custodial Violence’ Dawn (Karachi, 29 November 2025)
Tahir, Zulqernain, ‘With Recent Custodial Deaths in Punjab, What Is Being Done to Counter Police Brutality?’ Dawn (Karachi, 11 October 2019)
US Department of State, 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Pakistan (2024)
US Department of State, 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Pakistan (2025)
[1]Zulqernain Tahir, ‘With Recent Custodial Deaths in Punjab, What Is Being Done to Counter Police Brutality?’ Dawn (Karachi, 11 October 2019).
[2]US Department of State, 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Pakistan (2024), citing Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) data.
[3]US Department of State, 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Pakistan (2025), citing HRCP data.
[4]Human Rights Watch, ‘Pakistan: Make Torture a Crime’ (23 August 2022).
[5]US Department of State, 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Pakistan (2024).
[6]‘Pakistan’s Punjab Police Kill 900 People in Eight Months: What’s Going On?’ Al Jazeera (18 February 2026), reporting HRCP findings.
[7]ibid.
[8]ibid (quoting Farah Zia, HRCP Director).
[9]ibid (quoting Rida Hosain).
[10]Kamran Adil, ‘Torture Law and The Criminal Justice System in Pakistan’ (RSIL, 2 May 2024).
[11]‘About Custodial Torture’ The News on Sunday (Dialogue).
[12]ibid.
[13]Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, art 14(2).
[14]ibid arts 9, 10, 10-A.
[15]Pakistan Penal Code 1860, ss 300, 302, 332, 339, 340, 350, 351.
[16]Pakistan Penal Code 1860, s 337-K, inserted by the Qisas and Diyat Ordinance 1990.
[17]Police Order 2002, art 156; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police Act 2017, s 119; Sindh Police Act 2019, ss 36, 156.
[18]Kamran Adil (n 10).
[19]Torture and Custodial Death (Prevention and Punishment) Act 2022, s 2(1)(h).
[20]ibid s 3.
[21]ibid s 4(1)-(2).
[22]ibid ss 8-10.
[23]ibid s 13.
[24]ibid s 7.
[25]ibid s 5(1)-(2).
[26]Kamran Adil (n 10).
[27]UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment 1984 (ratified by Pakistan 2010); International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966; Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948.
[28]Human Rights Watch (n 4).
[29]Benazir Bhutto v The President of Pakistan PLD 1998 SC 388.
[30]Khalid Mehmood and others v The District Police Officer, DG Khan and others 2026 SCLR 21 (Mandokhail J); see also ‘SC Affirms State’s Duty to Protect Right to Life, Prevent Custodial Violence’ Dawn (Karachi, 29 November 2025).
[31]ibid.
[32]Ministry of Human Rights, Government of Pakistan, Report under the Convention Against Torture, citing Human Rights Case No. 1061 of 2007; Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan 1973, art 184(3).
[33]‘HRCP Flags Gaps in Anti-Torture Law and Custodial Abuse, Demands Reforms’ Express Tribune (Karachi, 2026).
[34]ibid.
[35]‘Pakistan’s Punjab Police Kill 900 People in Eight Months’ (n 6).
[36]ibid.
[37]Express Tribune (n 33).
[38]Human Rights Watch (n 4).
[39]Criminal Justice Act 1988, s 134; Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, s 78.
[40]Independent Office for Police Conduct, ‘About Us’ (policeconduct.gov.uk); ‘Independent Office for Police Conduct’, Wikipedia.
[41]House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, Report on the Independent Office for Police Conduct (1 March 2022).
[42]Kamran Adil (n 10).
[43]D.K. Basu v State of West Bengal AIR 1997 SC 610.
[44]OMCT, ‘Global Torture Index 2025: India Factsheet’ (2025), citing National Human Rights Commission of India data.
[45]Express Tribune (n 33).
[46]Right to Fair Trial: Better Late than Never (SAHSOL Blog); Code of Criminal Procedure 1898, s 167.
