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........

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