The writer is an economist, anchor, jurist, geopolitical analyst and the President of All Pakistan Private Schools’ Federation
president@Pakistanprivateschools.com
Any person who believes that the state’s power to take life must be constrained by open justice, an independent judiciary, and the right to confront one’s accusers should find the Anti-Terrorism (Punjab) Amendment Bill profoundly alarming. The Punjab Assembly passed the Anti-Terrorism (Punjab Amendment) Bill 2026 amid opposition walkouts, chants, and accusations of constitutional betrayal. The legislation inserts a new Section 21AAA into the federal Anti-Terrorism Act 1997, creating a regime of “special security cases.” In these cases, a government-appointed “designated authority”—a Grade 20 (or equivalent) bureaucrat whose own identity remains confidential and known primarily to the Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court—can declare individual cases or entire classes of cases to require “extraordinary protection.” Once so designated, the identities of the judge, public prosecutor, defence counsel, police officers, and witnesses are shielded. Official titles replace names on orders; witnesses receive codes; proceedings may occur via videolink (including from prisons) with voice-alteration technology; files are sealed and jointly controlled; and access is tightly restricted. By empowering “faceless courts” — judges whose identities are concealed — to try terrorism offences and impose the death penalty, the Punjab government has taken a decisive step toward secretive adjudication that is incompatible with Pakistan’s Constitution, the jurisprudence of its superior courts, and fundamental norms of international human rights law. The stated rationale is protection. Pakistan has suffered catastrophic losses to terrorism—judges, prosecutors, witnesses, and investigators have been threatened, intimidated, or killed. Existing Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) frameworks and limited witness-protection measures under the ATA have proven insufficient in the most extreme cases. Proponents, including the Punjab Assembly Speaker, invoked historical trauma and pointed to practices in other democracies. Security of the justice system is a legitimate state interest. Yet the architecture of this amendment does not merely protect participants; it fundamentally reconfigures the trial process itself in ways that strike at the heart of due process. The Punjab Amendment Bill asks us to trade the Constitution for convenience. It asks a man facing death to argue his life before a court he is not allowed to see. That is not justice. That is not anti-terrorism. That is terror by the state. Pakistan has already paid the price for shortcut justice: thousands of overturned convictions, international condemnation, and a legal system that citizens do not trust. If we want to defeat terrorism, we must defeat it with more law, not less. The Assembly should reject this Bill. If passed, the Supreme Court should strike it down. And every citizen who believes that “innocent until proven guilty” means something should be outraged — because today it is a terrorism suspect in a faceless court. Tomorrow, it could be anyone. The Anti-Terrorism (Punjab) Amendment Bill does not merely adjust procedure; it alters the character of justice. It replaces an open, accountable judiciary with a concealed one and does so in cases where the state seeks to extinguish life. That choice is inconsistent with Articles 4, 9, 10-A and 25 of the Constitution, with the settled jurisprudence of Pakistan’s superior courts, and with Pakistan’s international obligations under the ICCPR. Terrorism is a grave threat that demands firm and effective responses. Those responses must themselves remain lawful. A system that cannot look the accused — and the public — in the eye when it decides questions of life and death has already begun to lose the moral and legal authority it claims to defend. The Bill should be rejected, or at minimum radically amended, to restore the elementary requirements of due process. Anything less invites a jurisprudence of shadows in which neither security nor justice can ultimately prevail. The amendment expands the Anti-Terrorism Act framework in Punjab by authorising special courts in which the identity of the judge (and potentially other participants) remains hidden from the accused, counsel, and the public. These courts are empowered to hear cases under anti-terrorism legislation and to pass the full range of sentences, including death. Proponents will invoke the real and serious threat of terrorism and the personal danger faced by judges who have been targeted in the past. Those concerns are legitimate. They do not, however, justify dismantling the core guarantees of a fair trial. By design, terrorism law is where a state tests its own commitment to the rule of law. When the threat is real, the temptation is to suspend process in the name of security. The Punjab government’s Anti-Terrorism (Punjab) Amendment Bill does exactly that. By authorising faceless courts to try terrorism cases, including those where death can be imposed, Punjab has crossed a line that the Constitution of Pakistan, international law, and 70 years of comparative jurisprudence have all drawn in red. This is not a reform, but is a rollback. While the full text is still being debated in the Punjab Assembly, the core proposal, as reported, is to allow Anti-Terrorism Courts in Punjab to conduct proceedings where the identity of the judge, prosecutor, and witnesses may be concealed from the accused and the public. The stated goal is witness protection and judicial security. The problem: when anonymity extends to the bench itself, you no longer have a court. You have an administrative panel that can deprive a person of life and liberty without the most basic safeguards of an open trial. Why It Violates the Constitution of Pakistan; as the Constitution does not suspend due process for terrorism. Article 10A: Right to Fair Trial — “For the determination of his civil rights and obligations or in any criminal charge against him a person shall be entitled to a fair trial and due process.” The Supreme Court in Mehram Ali v. Federation of Pakistan, PLD 1998 SC 1445, struck down military courts trying civilians precisely because they lacked transparency, appeal, and judicial independence. Article 10-A of the Constitution of Pakistan guarantees the right to a fair trial and due process. Article 9 protects life and liberty except in accordance with law. Article 4 affirms the right of every citizen to be treated in accordance with law. Article 25 guarantees equality before the law. Article 10A of the Constitution of Pakistan, inserted by the 18th Amendment, guarantees that “for the determination of his civil rights and obligations or in any criminal charge against him a person shall be entitled to a fair trial and due process.” Pakistani superior courts have treated this as a robust, freestanding fundamental right encompassing notice, hearing, an independent and impartial tribunal, the ability to challenge the adjudicator, effective defence, and open justice as a general rule. The Supreme Court has emphasised that even in heinous crimes, the right cannot be diluted by the gravity of the allegation; fairness is non-negotiable. Faceless proceedings directly impair the ability to assess and challenge judicial bias or competence. They undermine the separation of powers under Article 175(3), which requires the judiciary to be independent of the executive. Handing a Grade 20 executive officer decisive influence over case classification, prosecutorial selection, witness coding, and the secrecy architecture of a criminal trial—especially one that can end in death—places the executive inside the judicial process. Critics, including opposition legislators, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), and senior counsel, have argued that this violates Articles 4, 9, 10A, 14, 25, and 175, and may even raise competence issues under Article 143 if it conflicts with the federal scheme of the ATA. Pakistan is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Article 14 guarantees a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent, and impartial tribunal established by law. The UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment No. 32 and its jurisprudence on “faceless judges” (notably cases from Peru and Colombia) have repeatedly held that anonymous tribunals fail the independence and impartiality requirements. Defendants cannot know who judges them and therefore cannot assess competence or impartiality; the system often accompanies other irregularities such as restricted public access, constrained defence rights, and limited cross-examination. The Committee has treated such arrangements as incompatible with Article 14. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has similarly condemned faceless judges as violating the right to a public hearing. These provisions are not aspirational rhetoric; they have been given concrete content by the superior courts. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that a fair trial requires an independent, impartial, and visible judiciary. In Benazir Bhutto v. Federation of Pakistan and subsequent cases, the Court emphasised that justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done. A “faceless judge” fails the same test: the accused cannot know who is judging him, cannot challenge bias, and the public cannot scrutinise the proceedings. Article 4: Right to be Dealt with in Accordance with Law — Due process requires that law be applied by known, accountable authorities. Secret tribunals were rejected by the Court in District Bar Association Rawalpindi v. Federation, PLD 2015 SC 401 when it held that justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done. Article 9: Right to Life — The death penalty is permissible, but only after the “most rigorous standards of procedural fairness.” Khizar Hayat v. State, PLD 2019 SC 399 reaffirmed that in capital cases, any procedural defect vitiates the trial. Anonymity of the judge is a structural defect. Article 19A: Right to Information — Open court is the default. Closure is allowed only for specific reasons, and never to hide the identity of the adjudicator. Punjab cannot legislate around the Constitution. Under Article 142, criminal law and criminal procedure are on the Concurrent Legislative List. The federal Anti-Terrorism Act 1997 already provides a complete code, including witness protection under Section 21-F. A provincial amendment creating parallel, secret courts is ultra vires. Secret or anonymous adjudication undermines public confidence and the accused’s ability to challenge bias or improper influence. The Court has also insisted, in the context of anti-terrorism legislation itself, that exceptional measures must remain proportionate and subject to rigorous judicial scrutiny (Mehram Ali v. Federation of Pakistan; Liaquat Hussain v. Federation of Pakistan). Special courts are constitutionally tolerable only when they preserve the essential attributes of a fair trial — open proceedings, an identifiable adjudicator, and the opportunity for effective defence. Faceless judges invert this logic. An accused cannot meaningfully raise a challenge of bias or conflict of interest against an unknown decision-maker. The public cannot assess whether the process is independent of executive pressure. When the penalty is death, these deficits become irreversible. Pakistan’s superior courts have consistently treated capital punishment as requiring the highest degree of procedural safeguards. Concealing the identity of the person who decides whether a citizen lives or dies is incompatible with that standard.
As per international law, this fails every test. Pakistan is a party to the ICCPR. Article 14(1) requires that “all persons shall be equal before the courts and tribunals… In the determination of any criminal charge… everyone shall be entitled to a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal established by law.” The UN Human Rights Committee, in General Comment No. 32, states that the requirement of publicity means the press and public may attend, and the judgment must be made public. Historical experiments—Peru’s anti-terror faceless courts under Fujimori, Colombia’s public-order courts—produced widespread documented miscarriages of justice, wrongful convictions, and eventual international condemnation and reform. Italy’s use of protected identities for mafia cases was narrower and operated within a different institutional culture with stronger residual safeguards. The Punjab model combines anonymity of the judge, prosecutor selection by the executive, anonymity of defence counsel, coded witnesses, sealed records, and potential capital outcomes. This is closer to the more problematic Latin American experiments than to carefully calibrated protective measures. International law permits narrowly tailored, temporary, and strictly necessary limitations on publicity for national security or the safety of persons, but the core requirements of an independent and impartial tribunal, effective defence, and equality of arms are not dispensable. Derogation under Article 4 ICCPR in a public emergency is possible only to the extent strictly required and must be formally proclaimed; a permanent structural amendment to ordinary criminal procedure does not qualify. Anonymity of the judge makes both impossible. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly held that while witness anonymity can be permitted in exceptional cases — Doorson v. Netherlands, 1996 — the anonymity of the judge is never permissible. A tribunal whose members are unknown cannot be “established by law” or “impartial” under Article 6 ECHR. The UK Supreme Court in R v. Davis UKHL 36 allowed limited witness anonymity but warned that any measure threatening the open nature of justice must be strictly necessary and proportionate. The US Supreme Court in In re Oliver, 333 U.S. 257 (1948) called a “secret trial” a mockery of due process. Even in national security cases, democracies use protective measures, not faceless benches: in camera hearings, pseudonyms for witnesses, video links, and specialised ATCs with security. None require hiding the judge. International human rights law is unambiguous. Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Pakistan is a party, guarantees a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal. The Human Rights Committee has made clear that anonymity of judges is an exceptional measure that must be strictly necessary and accompanied by compensatory safeguards; it cannot become the default for an entire category of serious offences. The right to know the identity of one’s judge is part of the broader right to an independent tribunal and to challenge its impartiality. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly stressed the importance of open justice and identifiable adjudicators. While limited anonymity for witnesses may be permitted under strict conditions (Doorson v. Netherlands; Van Mechelen v. Netherlands), the Court has never endorsed systematic concealment of the judges themselves in capital or life-imprisonment cases. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been even more categorical in rejecting “faceless” or “secret” judges in terrorism and organised-crime prosecutions, holding that such systems violate the right to a fair trial and the principle of judicial independence. In the United Kingdom, the common-law tradition of open justice remains robust. Special advocates and closed-material procedures exist, but they are tightly circumscribed, subject to judicial oversight, and do not extend to anonymous judges deciding guilt and sentence in ordinary criminal trials. The United States Supreme Court has never accepted the proposition that a defendant’s life may be taken by an unidentified adjudicator. The Confrontation Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment presuppose an identifiable tribunal. Even in the context of national-security cases, anonymity of judges is unknown. Comparative experience with “faceless judges” is instructive and sobering. Peru’s use of anonymous judges during the Fujimori era produced systematic abuses, coerced confessions, and convictions later recognised as unsafe. Colombia’s experience with jueces sin rostro generated sustained criticism from the Inter-American system and ultimately led to reform. India’s experiments with special courts under anti-terrorism laws have been repeatedly scrutinised by its Supreme Court for compliance with fair-trial guarantees; wholesale judicial anonymity has not been accepted as a constitutional solution. Open justice is not an optional courtesy. Public scrutiny deters arbitrariness, builds institutional legitimacy, and allows systemic errors to surface. Sealing files, anonymising the entire cast, and conducting remote voice-altered hearings reverse the default of publicity that underpins democratic adjudication. Core features and immediate implications are that the designated authority initiates classification, requests assignment of an ATC judge by the Lahore High Court Chief Justice, and selects a prosecutor from a panel. Identities remain undisclosed “under any circumstances.” Judicial orders carry titles rather than signatures of identifiable judges. Defence counsel’s identity is also protected—raising the surreal possibility that an accused may not fully know or freely choose the lawyer representing them in the usual sense. Hearings can be remote, sealed, and technologically anonymised. These measures apply to terrorism cases that can, and often do, carry the death penalty under the ATA. An accused facing capital punishment may therefore confront a process in which the decision-maker is anonymous, the prosecutor is chosen by an executive official, witnesses appear only as codes or distorted voices, the defence lawyer’s identity is obscured, and the public and higher scrutiny are severely limited. Recusal for bias becomes practically impossible when the judge’s identity is unknown. Cross-examination of anonymous witnesses is constrained. The appearance of impartiality—the requirement that justice must not only be done but be seen to be done—collapses. While limited in-camera proceedings or witness protection have long existed and can be justified on a case-by-case, court-supervised basis, a structural regime triggered by an executive official and applying to classes of cases is qualitatively different. Security is a real danger, but fear cannot become a constitutional excuse. Judges in Pakistan have been attacked and killed. They deserve protection — armed escorts, secure courtrooms, threat investigations, and relocation. What they do not deserve, and what the Constitution does not permit, is to be made invisible. Witness protection is also a real problem, but there are constitutional alternatives. Judges of ATCs have been targeted. But the answer is not to hide the court. It is to protect it. Fully fund and implement Section 21-F ATA 1997 and the Witness Protection Act 2017. Provide 24/7 security to judges, prosecutors, and witnesses. Use video testimony, screens, and pseudonyms for witnesses as allowed in State v. Obaidullah, PLD 2017 Lahore 1. Create a federal judicial security force, as done in the US Marshals model. These measures protect people without destroying process. The moment you hide the identity of the judge, you do not protect justice. You erase it. There can be no accountability if you do not know who condemned you. There can be no appeal if you cannot prove bias. There can be no public trust if no one can see the trial. In death penalty cases, where the margin for error must be zero, faceless adjudication is not a safeguard. It is a defect by design. As Ghulam Sarwar v. State, PLD 2020 SC 554 and decades of superior court rulings show, Pakistan’s courts overturn capital convictions precisely for failures of record, bias, and process. A secret bench makes those failures impossible to catch. Today it is called “terrorism.” Tomorrow it will be called anything the state finds inconvenient. Pakistan does not need invisible judges to fight terrorism. It needs visible justice. Because a nation that sacrifices due process to save lives will, in the end, lose both.
This is not protection of the vulnerable; it is the calculated inversion of the very idea that power must answer to the individual. When the Constitution’s guarantee of a fair trial under Article 10A is subordinated to executive whim, when transparency—the oxygen of accountability—is declared a security risk, the rule of law does not merely bend; it fractures. Faceless justice is no justice at all: it is the quiet substitution of the state’s fear for the citizen’s liberty, a precedent that once normalized will outlive every temporary threat it claims to answer. History’s darkest chapters begin not with open tyranny, but with the polite erasure of the faces that once held power to account. Punjab’s amendment does not fortify the republic against terror; it invites the republic to become the very darkness it professes to combat...
In the shadowed chambers of Punjab’s newly minted “special security” regime, justice has been stripped of its human face and reduced to an administrative cypher—anonymous judges, coded witnesses, sealed records, and an unelected official whose nod can consign a citizen to a trial without the elemental right to know who sits in judgment. The absence of precise statutory criteria for declaring a “special security case” or “class of cases” creates a risk of overbreadth and selective application. In a polarised political environment, the power to route politically sensitive cases into an opaque track invites abuse—whether against genuine terrorists, political opponents, journalists, or protesters framed under expansive terrorism definitions. Once a case enters the faceless track, external scrutiny, media reporting, academic analysis, and even effective appellate review become extraordinarily difficult. Death sentences issued under such conditions carry irreversible consequences and permanent legitimacy deficits. Existing tools—physical security, relocation, in-camera hearings ordered by the trial judge, limited anonymity for specific witnesses under judicial supervision, and technological safeguards without wholesale anonymisation of the judiciary—could address genuine threats without dismantling the architecture of open justice. The amendment opts instead for a parallel, executive-influenced secrecy regime. No serious observer denies the real threats faced by those who participate in terrorism prosecutions in Pakistan. Protecting judges, prosecutors, investigators, and witnesses is a duty of the state. The question is whether the chosen method respects the constitutional and international boundaries that define a fair trial. The Anti-Terrorism (Punjab) Amendment Bill 2026, by institutionalising faceless adjudication capable of imposing the ultimate penalty, subordinates due process to executive-controlled secrecy. A person who believes in the rule of law should be outraged—not because security is unimportant, but because a system that can condemn a human being to death while concealing the identity of the judge, the prosecutor, the witnesses, and even aspects of the defence, and that places classification power in an anonymous executive official, ceases to be recognisable as a court of law in the constitutional sense. It becomes something else: a closed administrative process dressed in judicial form. Legislatures can and must craft protective measures that are narrowly tailored, time-bound where possible, subject to robust judicial oversight, and transparent in their criteria. Anything less trades the long-term legitimacy of the justice system for short-term operational convenience. History, both Pakistani and comparative, suggests that such trades exact a heavy price. The Punjab amendment tests whether Pakistan’s constitutional commitment to fair trial and due process is robust enough to withstand the pressure of fear. The answer, for now, appears troublingly uncertain. This is not protection of the vulnerable; it is the calculated inversion of the very idea that power must answer to the individual. When the Constitution’s guarantee of a fair trial under Article 10A is subordinated to executive whim, when transparency—the oxygen of accountability—is declared a security risk, the rule of law does not merely bend; it fractures. Faceless justice is no justice at all: it is the quiet substitution of the state’s fear for the citizen’s liberty, a precedent that once normalised will outlive every temporary threat it claims to answer. History’s darkest chapters begin not with open tyranny, but with the polite erasure of the faces that once held power to account. Punjab’s amendment does not fortify the republic against terror; it invites the republic to become the very darkness it professes to combat.
