By Dimitra Staikou
On August 31, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, justice acquired the ability to lose its face. The Provincial Assembly approved a controversial amendment to the country’s anti-terrorism legislation, introducing an exceptional regime of secrecy in terrorism cases and allowing, among other things, the identities of individuals at the very heart of a trial to be concealed. The development seems to place reality somewhere between two radically different works: The Staircase and Franz Kafka’s The Trial. In Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s documentary series on the Michael Peterson case, which began in 2004 and was completed on Netflix in 2018, we see almost everything: the judge, prosecutors, defence lawyers, witnesses, experts and evidence — and yet we are still left wondering whether the judicial process can truly produce certainty. Kafka imagined the opposite nightmare: Josef K. sees almost nothing and, for precisely that reason, is defenceless against an impersonal and opaque machinery of justice. In The Staircase, you doubt despite being able to see; in The Trial, you are powerless because you cannot see. And since August 31, in Punjab, that contrast no longer belongs solely to television and literature. It has become a political and legal question: how much opacity can a trial withstand before it ceases to be a trial in any meaningful sense?
The amendment to the Anti-Terrorism Act approved by Punjab opens the way for “special security cases” in which the identities of judges, prosecutors, witnesses and even defence lawyers may be concealed. Witnesses may appear under codes, voices may be altered, and proceedings may take place through secure electronic links, while a state-appointed “designated authority” — a senior official whose own identity also remains confidential — assumes a central role. The need to protect judges and witnesses from terrorist organisations is real. But the crucial question lies elsewhere: who decides what must remain secret, who oversees the person making that decision, and whether the accused still retains meaningful means of defence. When the possible punishment is death, this becomes the difference between secrecy that protects justice and secrecy that protects power from scrutiny.
What makes this particularly troubling is that Punjab is not legislating on a blank slate. In recent years, Pakistan has repeatedly come under scrutiny from UN human rights mechanisms over the intersection of national security and political repression. In 2024, the UN Human Rights Committee expressed concern over the use of counterterrorism and other laws against protesters, activists, human rights defenders and political opponents, alongside allegations of arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, torture and excessive use of force. In 2025, UN experts raised further concerns over Balochistan, including the alleged misuse of counterterrorism measures against activists. According to Human Rights Watch, between January and August 2025 alone, Pakistani authorities registered approximately 689 cases under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, many involving journalists. In 2026, the UN Committee Against Torture called on Islamabad to protect journalists, lawyers, activists and political opponents from arbitrary detention, unwarranted prosecution and enforced disappearance.
The paradox becomes even sharper when Pakistan frames much of its security policy through the prism of its existential rivalry with India. The threat is real: after the attack in Pahalgam in April 2025, which killed 26 people, the two nuclear-armed states were drawn into a dangerous military confrontation. Yet an external threat does not answer the internal question: why should fighting terrorism require fewer rights for the accused? India itself provides an uncomfortable precedent. Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, the sole surviving member of the ten-man group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, was a Pakistani national who participated in a massacre that left more than 160 people dead. Yet he was tried with legal representation; the Bombay High Court reviewed his death sentence, and his case reached the Supreme Court of India, which appointed senior advocate Raju Ramachandran to represent him when he appeared before it without counsel. Kasab was ultimately convicted and executed. But that is precisely the point: a fair trial is not a reward reserved for the innocent, nor a privilege to be withdrawn from those we regard as monsters. It is a restraint the state imposes upon itself when confronting even its worst enemy.
There is, however, an even more revealing way to measure Pakistan’s distance from that principle: look at those who have been forced to leave the country to continue speaking. In January 2026, an anti-terrorism court in Islamabad convicted four prominent journalists and commentators living abroad — Sabir Shakir, Shaheen Sehbai, Wajahat Saeed Khan and Moeed Pirzada — in absentia, sentencing each to two life terms plus an additional 35 years in prison over charges linked to their coverage and commentary on the protests that followed Imran Khan’s arrest in 2023. Shakir lives in Britain, while others are based in the United States; Sehbai said he learned of his conviction through the media. In March 2026, Freedom House openly described Pakistan as pursuing an “intensifying campaign of transnational repression.” Nor is the phenomenon new. As early as 2020, Reporters Without Borders disclosed a Pakistani government document that named six journalists based in Europe and the United States and called for their movements and social media accounts to be monitored. Exile, then, does not always mark the end of repression; sometimes it is simply the moment when repression acquires an international address.
And this is where Pakistan begins to feel less distant from Europe than it might initially appear. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey knows well how the language of terrorism can evolve from an instrument for protecting the state into a vocabulary for restricting dissent. Ankara and Islamabad have built a close strategic relationship, with security, defence and counterterrorism among its established pillars. In Turkey, international human rights organisations and European institutions have for years documented the use of counterterrorism provisions against journalists, human rights defenders and political opponents. Pakistan follows a different historical and institutional trajectory, but the parallels are troubling: counterterrorism laws expanding beyond their original scope, journalists prosecuted or driven into exile, political opponents increasingly viewed through the lens of national security, and now, in Punjab, a judicial process that can operate behind an even thicker veil of secrecy. Democracy, after all, is not always lost in a coup, nor is justice abolished only when the courts are closed. It can be eroded quietly: one exception, one accusation of “terrorism,” one journalist, one fair-trial guarantee at a time. And then we return to where we began: in The Staircase, we could see justice and still doubt it; in Kafka, we could not see it — and that was precisely why we feared it.
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About the Author:
Dimitra Staikou is a Greek lawyer, journalist, and professional writer with extensive expertise on South Asia, China, and the Middle East, now based in India. Her analyses on geopolitics, international trade, and human rights have been published in leading outlets, including Modern Diplomacy, HuffPost Greece, Skai.gr, Eurasia Review, and the Daily Express (UK). Fluent in English, Greek, and Spanish, Dimitra combines legal insight with on-the-ground reporting and creative storytelling, offering a nuanced perspective on global affairs.
