For decades, Pakistan has remained among the lowest-ranked countries in global assessments of human rights, reflecting persistent and systemic violations. These violations were often framed through ethnic and religious lenses, whether in relation to Bengalis, Baloch and Pashtun populations, or religious minorities such as Shia Muslims and Ahmadis. Today, however, the scope of repression has expanded beyond identity-based persecution to the systematic criminalisation of ‘political’ dissent.

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Colonial Laws and the Architecture of Contemporary Authoritarianism

While Pakistan’s experience is distinctive, it also reflects a broader challenge confronting many postcolonial states across South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, where incomplete processes of state formation have enabled the persistence and adaptation of coercive institutions inherited from colonial rule.Situated within this broader postcolonial context, Pakistan’s contemporary authoritarian trajectory is sustained through the continued deployment of colonial-era legal, bureaucratic, and security structures that facilitate political control and systemic repression.

The decolonisation of the Indian subcontinent in August 1947 created two sovereign states, Pakistan and India. Both inherited not only the territorial and administrative machinery of the British Raj but also the deep structural anxieties embedded within colonial governance.While India has largely maintained electoral continuity, albeit with growing concerns over democratic backsliding, Pakistan has repeatedly oscillated between military rule and tightly managed civilian governments. Having governed directly for extended periods under military dictators, the military has remained the country’s most powerful political institution, exercising decisive influence even during nominally democratic periods.

Another key argument is that although major powers routinely champion democracy, human rights, and the rule of law as universal principles, but their commitments are often subordinated to strategic and geopolitical interests. International responses reveal a sustained pattern of selective engagement in which concerns about democratic governance and human rights are eclipsed by geopolitical calculations.

To understand how this diplomatic paradox operates in practice, it is necessary to examine the contemporary trajectory of authoritarian governance in Pakistan and I am focussing largely post April 2022 era when the former Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted from PM Office through a highly contested vote of no confidence, since then Pakistan entered into an increasingly coercive political phase characterised by escalating state violence.Central to this authoritarian turn has been the continued deployment of colonial-era legal instruments originally designed to suppress anti-colonial resistance.

Rather than being dismantled after independence, these laws have been reconfigured to regulate contemporary political opposition. Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code and the Maintenance of Public Order (MPO) framework—both rooted in colonial emergency governance—have been repeatedly invoked to prohibit political gatherings. The selective application of these two colonial-era legal instruments became central to the state’s crackdown on political dissent. The repression intensified after the events of 9 May 2023, when thousands protested the arrest of Imran Khan, continued throughout the 2024 electoral period, and persists today. Throughout this period, these legal provisions have been used disproportionately against the Pakistan........

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