An attack on the bar: The re-imprisonment of Imaan Mazari and Hadi Chattha

The re-imprisonment of Imaan Mazari and Hadi Chattha is an attack on the bar. There is no other way of framing this.

Two lawyers are being persecuted again and again, to stop them from representing victims of state abuse. To stop them from raising their voices for the most vulnerable. To stop them, most important, from presenting young Pakistanis with an alternative vision: that amid a sea of cushion-warmers, there is still something to be gained from the will to act. That if the young are brave enough, they can still remake the world they find.

Because seventeen years for tweeting was a travesty. Perhaps the word ‘travesty’ itself was invented for such a sentence. In a place where killers walk free in a day via coerced compromises, and where 14 years is thought good enough for even the most wretched on death row, two human rights fighters posed the most serious threat to society, and – as recent, sinister developments attest – continue to do so.

What were they in for, before their sentences were suspended? Expressing solidarity with the disappeared. That’s it. The state called it ‘cyber-terrorism’. The fact that UN experts have had to step in to say the obvious – that a lawyer’s freedom of expression cannot be conflated with criminal conduct, what to say of actual terrorism – tells you where we are. Incredibly, Hadi was sent to jail for hitting no more than the retweet button.

But if nothing is true, everything is permitted: in appeals before the Dogar Court in Islamabad, little came of anything. Watching the grim tableau play out before him, the Supreme Court’s Justice Naeem Akhter Afghan said “it was better not to seek our opinion on the Islamabad High Court’s system” and to let said system be fully exposed. It would be hard to overstate his words: moments after Faisal Siddiqi’s valorous defence saw Justice Afghan suspend Imaan and Hadi’s sentences, they were rearrested.

Yes, rearrested. Or so we think: Imaan’s mother Shireen Mazari is still unaware where the two were taken last night after the anti-terrorism court; whether they were in Adiala, or whether they ‘have been abducted to some other place’.

This is an old sadism stretching back at least half a century (a key precedent was the re-internment of Abdus Sattar Khan Niazi under the Bhutto regime): the arrest-bail-rearrest sequence calculated to break the spirit of political prisoners. And the superior courts have protected against said sadism in a near-unbroken line, calling it ‘arrest after arrest…in different blind reports lodged much earlier.’ The most recent flurry of immediate re-jailing has included that of Ali Wazir, Parvez Elahi, and Sheharyar Afridi – in the latter’s case, Justice Babar Sattar dubbed it a ‘fraud on the state and the Constitution’ and ‘malice in law’.

The sequence is even more bogus when looked at from another angle: Imaan and Hadi sat in Adiala jail for eight months. Each day of that imprisonment was available for this brand-new Kohsar investigation; the FIR had been lodged a year prior, and an accused can be investigated in all registered cases, whether during physical remand or, with leave, during judicial custody. No such thing happened. (In other such instances, the whole game is to keep the prisoner ignorant of the reserve case so they can’t seek bail preemptively.)

The fact remains that the superior courts have built, case by case since at least 1974, a complete jurisprudence against the revolving door, from Niazi in the ’70s to Raeesa Farooq in the ’90s, to contemporary verdicts named for PTM and PTI leaders Wazir and Afridi.

Of course, the superior courts themselves are in flux. From the shameful episode of 4:3-3:2 in the 90-days election matter – which began it all – to last night’s reimprisonment of Imaan and Hadi, the Supreme Court is fighting to enforce its writ. For some, its remnant powers are no longer in question: recently, this paper reported that the Attorney-General for Pakistan, while arguing in another case, made the remarkable statement that “after the passage of the 27th Amendment, the SC no longer had the authority to protect fundamental rights.”

By that logic, fundamental rights are now irrelevant to the Supreme Court when deciding thousands of cases still before it. Of course, it was this same attorney general that thought the 90 days matter had been decided 4:3, that civilians were fit for military trials, and that Islamabad High Court’s finest judges were best packed off to Lahore and Peshawar. What the sum of all this has been for the rule of law in Pakistan is all around us.

While hearing Imaan and Hadi’s case, Justice Afghan said, “The case may disappear from the system, but we will not.” As of today, the liberty of Pakistan’s two most devoted rights fighters is the central tenet of the Supreme Court’s relevance: it must correct this glaring injustice, and every man and woman from every bar in the country must do whatever all is possible in securing Imaan and Hadi’s release.

If two lawyers can fight for the lost and left behind so hard, it would be shameful that the rest of us choose to look away.

Header image: A moment from the 2007 lawyers movement for the restoration of the judiciary. Credit: BBC