Punjab wants faceless secret trials for terrorism cases

Picture a death sentence with nobody’s name on it. The prosecutor is anonymous. The witnesses are just listed as numbers. The man sitting beside you might be your lawyer, he might not, but you’re not allowed to ask. The file on your case is locked away. Your appeal takes place in the same kafkaesque obscurity. Now imagine that this is how the courts will work after the Punjab Assembly passes this method into law on Monday.

Unfortunately, I do not have to trouble my imagination as this matter is very real to me. I sit on the Punjab Opposition benches where reading what the government tables is more or less the whole job. So this is what I’ve been reading.

The Treasury will tell you the Anti-Terrorism (Punjab Amendment) Bill 2026 is about protecting judges and witnesses. Alright. Judges in this province have been threatened as have prosecutors. Witnesses get shot at, bought up and scared off. Every word of this is true and I’ll say so from the floor. My problem is what the Treasury has written underneath the title of the would-be law.

A Bill further to amend the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997 (Insertion of Section 21AAA: Trial, inquiry and judicial proceedings of special security cases).

Briefly, the Punjab government wants to make major changes to the anti-terrorism law so terrorism cases can be tried confidentially. This would mean no one would know the identities of the judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers and witnesses. Last week, Opposition lawmaker Rana Aftab Ahmad Khan stood up to object, arguing that this was against the constitution as there should be open and fair trials for people accused in terrorism cases. The bill was put off for a vote scheduled Monday.

I should add here that the 1997 law already lets a court shut its doors and keep names out of the papers in Section 21. We also have a 2018 witness protection law that allows a trial inside jail. All of these mechanisms rest with the discretion of a judge. This bill, however, wrests these powers from the bench and places them somewhere else.

Somewhere else turns out to be one man.

The proposed bill says the government can nominate an officer of Grade 20, or whoever it decides counts as equivalent, and name him the designated authority. His credentials will be confidential. Only the Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court will be told who he is. And nowhere does the bill say this person has to be a civilian. Grade 20 or equivalent covers a lot of people, some of whom wear a uniform to work.

Once this designated authority is in, the court will do the paperwork. He can declare that a terrorism case is a matter of “extraordinary protection”, or a whole class of cases, which is worse. On his request, the Chief Justice shall assign the file to an Anti-Terrorism Court judge. There is nothing unusual about an ATA case going to an ATA judge. That is already in the law. The strangeness is in the request.

This designated officer then puts the case on a secret track, and it says that the Chief Justice shall follow. He does not get to leave it on the ordinary court roster. The officer then picks a prosecutor from a panel of five. He hands out the witness codes. He writes the rules for the video trial from prison. Orders come out with nobody’s name on them. Voices can be changed. The file is sealed between him and the Chief Justice, and the appeal court is blindfolded in the same way.

The Treasury keeps describing this as assistance to the court. An assistance that leaves the judge in charge of something. What it boils down to is this:

A man sitting in a dark room on a Zoom video call, where only his own camera is on, can be sentenced to death without knowing who judged him, who prosecuted him, who testified against him, or whether his own lawyer is his own lawyer.

Call this a mechanism, call it a forum, call it whatever the drafting note calls it. That is not a court as our Constitution and the world understands the definition of a court.

Article 10A went into the Constitution for exactly this sort of a situation. If charged with an offence, you have a right to a fair trial and due process, full stop. Article 9, life and liberty only according to law. Article 14, dignity inviolable. Article 25 keeps everyone in the same queue, which is precisely what stops one man from being tried in the open and another in a locked room because an officer nobody can name deemed this appropriate. And every legal system I know of means roughly the same thing by a fair trial. You can see the judge. You know the charge. You pick your lawyer. You get to test the evidence. You get reasons. The appeal does something.

Take the name off the judge and recusal dies with it. You can’t ask a blank space to step aside. You also can’t check whether the court was constituted properly in the first place, which people forget is a pesky detail you’re allowed to interrogate. What you’re left with is a page signed, “the Presiding Officer”.

Due process comes down to something fairly practical. You need to know enough about your accuser that cross-examination works. Codes and distorted voices, handed out by the executive, with no judge having looked at the file first and found it necessary, turn the witness box into a speaker mounted on a wall. Hang a man on a voice he was never permitted to test and you have produced an administrative outcome with a judge’s signature on it.
I certainly won’t put my name to this.

A counsel of your choice matters for a reason people skip. Put the defence lawyer on the same secrecy list as the protected witness and the accused has no way of telling whose instructions that lawyer is actually following. His, or the officers who classified the file? He’s alone in the room and won’t find out.

On appeal, the whole thing comes apart. The ATA already sends the record up within days. The Constitution already puts every subordinate court under High Court supervision. Now seal the file between the Chief Justice and a secret officer, keep the trial judge’s identity from the bench hearing the appeal, and tell me what the High Court is reviewing. A cupboard it can’t open. Closed proceedings are supposed to come from a judge who has read a particular file and given reasons for shutting the doors on it. Here they arrive pre-declared, wholesale, from an office.

On Thursday the Opposition raised these objections. Senior parliamentarian Rana Aftab Ahmad Khan took a point of order and asked for a ruling that the bill could not even sit on the agenda. Competence came up, as it was always going to. Yes, this Assembly can legislate on criminal law. But where our clause and Parliament’s clause can’t both stand, Parliament’s stands, and the ATA is federal Parliament’s Act. The Minister for Finance and Parliamentary Affairs, Mujtaba Shuja-ur-Rehman, then asked the Chair to pend the bill and took time to review it. The Chair did. But it came back on the agenda the next day, Friday, without any modification. It is expected to be back on Monday again.

That is not how you bury a point of order. The Chair is the custodian of the House. A member has asked for a ruling. The government’s own minister has asked for time. Before this draft comes back onto the floor it should go to a special committee drawn from both sides of the aisle, and the Chair should give a formal written ruling on whether it was even competent to be listed. Until that ruling is on paper, proceeding is the House pretending Thursday did not happen.

I’ll make the competence argument and I think it’s a good one. It still matters less to me than what follows it. Suppose a court eventually holds that a province may touch the ATA. Fine. You still don’t get to design a trial in which an accused never learns who convicted him and who testified against him.

Someone on the Treasury benches will argue other assemblies have already amended the same Act, so Punjab may as well. Balochistan did pass a cousin of this clause in September last year. That is not a precedent. An unconstitutional Act in Quetta does not become constitutional because it was printed first. This House answers to the Constitution of Pakistan, not to whoever moved fastest.

I keep being told these are extraordinary times. We’ve all heard that one.

After APS nobody tried to conjure a new kind of court out of an ordinary bill and a briefing. It went into the Constitution as the 21st Amendment. Military courts, defined class of cases, two years, dead unless Parliament brought it back. When the same instinct came round after May 9, somebody did try the shortcut. Civilians went to court martial under section 2(1)(d) of the Army Act. No amendment, no sunset, just a statute already on the books. The Supreme Court struck it down in 2023. And those trials only came back to life once the Court itself had been rebuilt, a constitutional bench assembled under the 26th Amendment, and that bench reversed the judgment. That’s the price this country has always charged for pulling a civilian off the ordinary bench. Amend the Constitution, or rearrange the highest Court of the land that would have stopped you. Far less stringent laws were not allowed by the constitutional courts during the times of military dictatorships.

Mehram Ali is the case they’ll cite, assuming somebody in the law department did the reading. They should finish it. The Supreme Court let anti-terrorism courts live on one condition, that they go on behaving like courts. Tenure. Procedure that resembles procedure. An appeal the High Court can actually look at. The Liaquat Hussain Case, the year after, said you don’t build a separate forum for civilians because the week was bloody. Find your answer inside the Constitution or don’t find one. A judge with no name, a sealed appeal, and a hidden officer who may or may not be in uniform sit well outside it.

Here’s the part that should worry the benches opposite more than it seems to.

I’ve watched elected houses hand the Executive a pen and then act astonished when the ink is spilled. But then it comes full circle as we saw with Nawaz Sharif who took the Anti-Terrorism Act through Parliament in 1997, was warned it wouldn’t stay in its lane, and was convicted under it by an anti-terrorism court soon enough. Since the politics turned, the same Act has gone after PTI workers. PECA is its compressed version. The PML-N drafted it and lived long enough to watch it boomerang.

Nobody has to feel sorry for a political party. Just look hard at what you’re voting for. A secret trial is a present you leave on the desk for whoever sits in that chair next or controls it from the background, and in this country somebody always does.

Keep the guards. Close the doors when the threat is real and a judge says so. Fund the 2018 witness protection law we passed and then forgot about. But don’t ask this House to vote a courtroom out of existence.

Monday is hours away. The bill seems more than likely to sail through the legislature with ease owing to the absolute majority at the Treasury benches. The handful members in the Opposition can do no more than make fiery speeches in terms of numbers. And if the State has to make the court disappear before it can convict a man, then the man in the dock is the smaller danger. For as they say when a clown moves into a palace, he does not become a king; the palace becomes a circus.

The author is a member of Punjab Assembly and chairperson of the standing committee on Energy. He is an Acumen Fellow and a former civil servant.

Header art: An AI-generated image mimicking one of the famous covers of Franz Kafka’s novel Der Prozess or The Trial.