An attack on the bar: The re-imprisonment of Imaan Mazari and Hadi Chattha

The re-imprisonment of Imaan Mazari and Hadi Chattha is an attack on the bar. There is no other way of framing this.

Two lawyers are being persecuted again and again, to stop them from representing victims of state abuse. To stop them from raising their voices for the most vulnerable. To stop them, most important, from presenting young Pakistanis with an alternative vision: that amid a sea of cushion-warmers, there is still something to be gained from the will to act. That if the young are brave enough, they can still remake the world they find.

Because seventeen years for tweeting was a travesty. Perhaps the word ‘travesty’ itself was invented for such a sentence. In a place where killers walk free in a day via coerced compromises, and where 14 years is thought good enough for even the most wretched on death row, two human rights fighters posed the most serious threat to society, and – as recent, sinister developments attest – continue to do so.

What were they in for, before their sentences were suspended? Expressing solidarity with the disappeared. That’s it. The state called it ‘cyber-terrorism’. The fact that UN experts have had to step in to say the obvious – that a lawyer’s freedom of expression cannot be conflated with........

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