Islamabad, Pakistan — Politicians in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, have passed a law allowing terrorism trials to be held in near-total secrecy, with the judge, prosecutor and witnesses permitted to remain anonymous.
Under the law, a person facing the country’s most serious criminal charge could be convicted without learning who heard the case against them, who prosecuted it or who testified.
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The trial record can be sealed, and an appeal could be heard by judges never told who presided over the original trial.
The Anti-Terrorism (Punjab Amendment) Bill 2026 passed the Punjab Assembly on August 31, after opposition politicians staged a walkout in protest.
Four days earlier, the government had appeared to relent, agreeing to have the bill reviewed by the law department or a parliamentary committee.
When it returned to the floor, it was unchanged and passed without amendment on Monday.
The law has drawn criticism from opposition politicians, lawyers, rights groups and analysts, who say it concentrates enormous power in a single, unnamed official and could be used against government critics.
What does the new law do?
The law lets the government appoint a senior bureaucrat as a “designated authority” tasked with deciding what cases are to be heard under the special provisions earmarked in the legislation.
The official’s identity is kept confidential, known only to the chief justice of the Lahore High Court.
The official can declare any terrorism case, or even a whole category of them, a “special security case” if they conclude that the people involved need special “protection”.
The law does not clearly define the parameters that need to be met, and the accused cannot contest being placed under this category. Once the official requests it, the chief justice assigns the case to a sitting anti-terrorism court judge. A panel of five public prosecutors is drawn up, and the official picks one.
From there, the identities of the judge, prosecutor, police officers, witnesses and defence lawyers cannot be disclosed under any circumstances. Official titles are used instead of names, and court orders are signed without revealing who signed them.
Witnesses are identified only by codes. Hearings can be held over videolink, including from inside a prison, with voice-altering technology used to disguise participants.
The case file is sealed and held jointly by the chief justice and the official.
The law includes no expiry date, and a final clause allows the government to adopt “such other measures as it may deem appropriate”, leaving room to add further powers without further legislation.
Why is the government doing this, and why now?
The government’s official justification, laid out in the bill itself, points to increased cases of attacks by armed groups, and rising threats faced by judges, prosecutors, investigators and witnesses. It argues that the existing law does not adequately protect them.
Speaker Malik Muhammad Ahmad Khan, on the floor of the assembly, invoked Pakistan’s toll from terrorism over the past two decades to argue that the assembly was the right forum to strengthen prosecutions.
Khalid Mahmood Ranjha, the legislator who tabled the bill, told Al Jazeera that the chief justice, not the designated authority, nominates the trial judge.
“There is no interference of the executive,” he said.
He dismissed fears that the law could be used against political opponents.
“It is just an apprehension,” the politician said, calling the criticism “propaganda to politicise and make the law controversial”.
“This law [is] only for hardened terrorists.”
But no single attack or case has been publicly named as the trigger.
Punjab also records only a small share of Pakistan’s terrorism-related deaths each year.
The vast majority occur in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, which together account for more than 90 percent of the country’s terrorism deaths.
Al Jazeera contacted Azma Bokhari, Punjab’s provincial minister for information, Marriyum Aurangzeb, senior minister in the Punjab government, and Rana Muhammad Iqbal, Punjab’s law minister, but did not receive a response.
What are critics saying?
Rida Hosain, a Lahore-based constitutional lawyer, said the threats facing judges, prosecutors and witnesses in Pakistan are real.
“There is no denying that Pakistan’s people and land have paid a devastating price for terrorism,” she told Al Jazeera. But she said no one who has actually read the amendment “can reasonably claim that it is consistent with due process”.
Opposition politicians argued the law violates the constitutional right to a fair trial and hands judicial-style powers to an unelected official with no oversight.
Ahmer Rasheed Bhatti, the independent legislator affiliated with jailed opposition leader Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party, led objections on the floor.
“It creates a parallel procedure in which the executive, not the court, decides what a fair trial will look like,” he told Al Jazeera.
The designated authority must consult the chief justice, he said, but does not need their agreement.
Hosain said the secrecy itself removes a basic safeguard.
“By introducing faceless courts, an accused is deprived of the ability to challenge judicial bias and safeguard judicial impartiality,” she told Al Jazeera. “While this law remains in force, the right to a fair trial and due process is effectively suspended in Punjab.”
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) also raised the alarm.
“The bill does not adequately define the circumstances in which these extraordinary powers may be invoked,” the commission’s spokesperson told Al Jazeera.
That, HRCP said, creates scope for abuse against ordinary citizens, political opponents or protesters in the name of security.
Mian Dawood, a Lahore-based constitutional lawyer, said existing law already lets courts protect witnesses and hold closed hearings under a judge’s control.
The new law, he said, moves that control to the executive rather than filling a gap. He said someone wrongly caught up in the system would have little recourse. Remedies such as a malicious-prosecution claim exist on paper but are “impracticable” in Pakistan’s courts, he said.
“A citizen has to suffer the misuse of powers by the state authorities,” the constitutional expert said.
Majid Nizami, a Lahore-based analyst, told Al Jazeera that Punjab province’s original antiterrorism law — enacted in 1997 and now amended with the controversial new provisions — was also misused.
“It looked very good on paper too,” Nizami said. “But what happened, eventually, was that it was used for political point-scoring and political manoeuvring.”
He said the law has, since 1997, been applied against nearly every major political party in Pakistan.
Nizami said he could not identify a Punjab case in the past decade where witness intimidation had derailed a prosecution — the ostensible justification for shielding the privacy of prosecutors and judges under the new amendments.
But there are older precedents. One case that stands out involved rebel commander Malik Ishaq. Ishaq co-founded Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a sectarian group blamed for killing hundreds of people, most of them Shia Muslims.
Named in more than 200 criminal cases, he repeatedly walked free after witnesses and even judges grew too frightened to move against him, until he was killed in a 2015 shootout after armed men freed him from police custody.
Has Pakistan tried this before?
Punjab itself passed a law last year giving authorities the power to detain terrorism suspects for up to three months without charge, part of a wider wave in which Balochistan and the federal government passed near-identical detention powers in 2025.
Balochistan passed a similar law in September 2025, letting a senior official anonymously flag cases for the same kind of concealed proceedings. It has been in force for about a year, without any publicly known case of its use.
Ranjha told Al Jazeera that Balochistan and Sindh had “already passed this law,” and that Punjab needed to follow.
While Sindh has amended its own antiterrorism law, it is only to let the provincial government resize or abolish antiterrorism courts based on caseload. It introduces no comparable anonymity or secrecy provisions. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has not amended its law along either track.
Salman Ghani, a political analyst, said Punjab’s situation differs from Balochistan’s for a simpler reason. “Punjab is still governable, and we don’t see terrorism incidents here every other day,” he told Al Jazeera.
Bhatti argued that gap was telling.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which, alongside Balochistan, faces the overwhelming majority of the country’s terrorism violence, has not adopted secret trials; Punjab, which faces almost none of it, has.
“The federal government looks instrumental,” Bhatti told Al Jazeera. “Provinces appear to have been asked to enact similar amendments.”
He does not believe Punjab’s government developed that appetite on its own. “You are not looking at a local caseload,” he said. “You are looking at a request.”
What happens next?
A legal challenge looks likely.
Opposition politicians have argued that the law conflicts with the constitution’s fair-trial guarantees and oversteps what a provincial assembly can legislate, since antiterrorism law falls under federal jurisdiction.
With no sunset clause built in, the law does not expire on its own; whether it survives will most likely be decided in court rather than by the assembly that passed it.
Bhatti drew a comparison with the last time Pakistan departed this far from ordinary courts: military trials for civilians, introduced only through a constitutional amendment after the 2014 Peshawar Army Public School massacre, and built with a two-year limit unless parliament renewed it.
“You do not need a faceless provincial trial in the safer province,” he told Al Jazeera, “Unless the facelessness is the point.”
