May 18, 2026. The Federal Shariat Court restored Section 325 of the Pakistan Penal Code. No protests. No emergency session. No coalition demanding reversal. A law that criminalises surviving a suicide attempt came back with less noise than a routine budget notification and that quietness tells you everything about whose lives this country considers worth protecting.

Section 325 was never Islamic in origin. It was lifted from British colonial legislation in 1860, inherited at Partition, and never examined because the people it harms have never been a constituency worth fighting for – those in psychiatric crisis, women with nowhere to go, transgender persons surviving without documents or shelter, men undone by debt. The court said decriminalisation was against the Quran and Sunnah. Classical Islamic jurisprudence says otherwise: legal responsibility requires sound intellect, severe mental illness suspends accountability, and preservation of life is a foundational obligation of the law. None of that was apparently the point.

The law does not fall on everyone the same way. Women facing domestic violence and/or workplace harassment and torture, transgender people with no institutional safety net, men without social capital or legal recourse – all they meet this law at their most exposed. For a woman already running........

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