Yahya Farid Khwaja
The writer is a Lawyer based in Islamabad
The rearrest of Imaan Mazari and Hadi Ali Chattha, only hours after the Supreme Court ordered their release, is difficult to view as anything other than a travesty of justice. At the very least, the sequence creates the unmistakable appearance that criminal procedure is being used by State not merely to investigate an offence, but as an instrument to ensure their continued incarceration.
Courts may grant bail, sentences may be suspended and release orders may be issued, but little remains of judicial protection if an eighteen month old case can immediately be activated to return the same individuals to prison. The law gives the State coercive powers for investigation and prosecution but it does not give it a weapon of choice to defeat liberty of a human being.
One may disagree with Imaan Mazari’s politics, rhetoric or style of advocacy. For many, her choice of words has often been confrontational and capable of aggravating ethnic divisions or undermining public institutions. However, disapproval of an individual’s politics cannot become a substitute for due process of law. Whatever one thinks of Imaan’s advocacy, the manner in which her liberty and that of Hadi Chattha have been repeatedly curtailed demands legal scrutiny.
On January 24, 2026, an Islamabad sessions court convicted the couple under Sections 9, 10 and 26-A PECA in a case arising from social media posts and sentenced them to terms totalling seventeen years.They challenged those convictions before the Islamabad High Court. After prolonged proceedings, the matter reached the Supreme Court. On September 17, after more than a two-member bench comprising Justice Naeem Akhtar Afghan and Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim suspended the operation of the trial court judgment and ordered both lawyers released on bail until their appeals before the IHC are decided.
Their liberty lasted only hours. IslamabadPolice rearrested the couple in connection with an FIR registered at Kohsar Police Station on March 22, 2025 around eighteen months earlier. The FIR accused them of anti-government sloganeering, blocking roads and obstructing officials, invoking Sections 188, 341, 506, 353 and 186 of the Pakistan Penal Code. Crucially, no provision of the Anti-Terrorism Act was included when theFIR was originally registered. Yet following their re-arrest, Mazari and Chattha were produced before an Anti-Terrorism Court late that night.
The prosecution then sought an extraordinary 30 days of physical remand which was refused by ATC Judge Abul Hasnat Muhammad Zulqarnain. The court noted that while the FIR alleged membership of an unlawful assembly, no weapon had been attributed to either accused and the demand for physical remand did not appear plausible. Instead, the court sent them to judicial custody for 14 days. Thus, within hours of the Supreme Court securing their release from incarceration, they found themselves back in jail, this time under an eighteen month old FIR for which the police had failed to persuade even the remand court that custodial interrogation was necessary.
This chronology raises the first fundamental legal problem. An FIR does not create an automatic obligation on the State andLaw Enforcement to arrest. In Mst Sughran Bibi v The State (PLD 2018 SC595), the Supreme Court held that ordinarily a person should not be arrested merely because he or she has been nominated in an FIR. The investigating officer must be satisfied that sufficient justification for arrest exists. That principle becomes especially important here. If custodial arrest was genuinely necessary, why did it take eighteen months for the State to realize that?
Mazari and Chattha were hardly absconders. They were known to the authorities, litigating before courts and, for months, incarcerated. The unexplained timing points out the kind of surrounding circumstance from which mala fide may legitimately be examined. The SupremeCourt has itself recognised in Khalil Ahmed Soomro v The State (PLD 2017SC 730) that mala fide is often incapable of direct proof and may be inferred from facts and circumstances. That the arrest was made on the evening theSupreme Court granted bail in the PECA case is the kind of circumstances that clearly points out towards malafide in this whole affair.
There is an equally troubling pattern witnessed in the last couple of years. Criminal procedure cannot be employed for a collateral purpose. If one dormant proceeding is activated immediately after another court orders release, the question is whether the second arrest serves a genuine investigative need or merely neutralises the first court’s order. The latter would reduce liberty to a procedural illusion. The State may investigate multiple cases, but it cannot legitimately operate a revolving door of detention in which every judicial release is answered by another arrest.That would transform criminal procedure from a mechanism of justice into the punishment itself.
Finally, the involvement of the Anti-Terrorism Court requires explanation. If the FIR originally contained no ATA provision, when was terrorism added, on what material, and how are the statutory ingredients satisfied? In Ghulam Hussain v The State (PLD 2020 SC 61),the Supreme Court made clear that even grave criminal conduct does not automatically constitute terrorism; the action must satisfy the specific design and purpose required by Section 6 of the ATA. Here, the remand judge himself noted that no weapon was attributed to the accused and just being part of an unlawful assembly, does not itself constitue an offence of terrorism.
Lastly, if the couple could appear before theSupreme Court, the High Court and other courts while litigating their cases, a serious question arises as to why judicial custody was indispensable at all.Justice cannot be reduced to keeping an accused behind bars first and findingthe procedural vehicle later.