Pakistan State Arrests, Sentences Human Rights Lawyers for Tweets.

On January 23rd, the Pakistani human rights lawyers Imaan Mazari and Hadi Ali Chatta were arrested on their way to court. According to Shireen Mazari, former Pakistani Federal Minister for Human Rights, and mother of Imaan Mazari, Mazari and Chatta “have been arrested, put in separate cars, and taken away to unknown locations.”

The following day ie January 24th saw both lawyers being sentenced to a collective seventeen years in prison, on charges that related to social media posts critical of the Pakistani state and armed forces (the latter a sacred cow in the South Asian nation), in August of 2025. According to DAWN News:

A court order written by Additional District and Sessions Judge Muhammad Afzal Majoka declared that the “prosecution has been able to prove its case against both the accused” under sections 9 (glorification of an offence), 10 (cyberterrorism), 26-A (false and fake information) of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (Peca).

Hence, under Peca’s Section 9, Imaan and Hadi were sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for five years each with a fine of Rs5 million each, in default of which each will undergo one more year of jail.

Under Section 10 of Peca, they were each handed 10 years of rigorous imprisonment with a fine of Rs30m each, with an additional two years for each in case of default.

Lastly, the couple were sentenced to two years’ rigorous imprisonment each under Section 26-A of Peca with a fine of Rs1m each, in default of which they will remain behind bars for six months each.

Further to this, according to Majoka’s legal judgement, and with the“active connivance” of Hadi (who is also married to Imaan Mazari):

She propagated a narrative that aligned with hostile terrorist groups and proscribed organisations and individuals. Her contents incited ethnic hatred, undermined public trust on state organisations and portrayed the armed forces are behind terrorism and forced disappearances.

Majoka’s order goes on (much of which the DAWN News link provides at length), but what is of interest and at the heart of the state’s case against Mazari and Hadi is that in addition to showing support and solidarity to Pashtun activists such as Manzoor Pashteen andBalochi activists such as Mahrang Baloch– head of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee rights movement, and a nominee for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent activism - the two human rights lawyers had the audacity to to be vocally critical of human rights violations in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa:

The said tweets of the accused persons damaged public trust in state institutions, especially law-enforcement agencies and the armed forces, and blamed the state for terrorism and enforced disappearances, the order stated.

“The matter does not rest here. Imaan Zainab Mazari accused claimed that the state runs torture cells and that dehumanisation, alienation and uncalled for crackdown/violence are the state-standard response to peaceful Baloch voice,” it further highlighted, declaring her as guilty under Section 10 of Peca.

Allegations and Responses:

The charges stem from allegations made on August 12th2025 by Pakistan’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) (whose Reporting Centre Assistant Director, Imran Haider, was a witness for the prosecution that led to the couple’s sentencing), that Mazari had been “propagating narratives that align with hostile terrorist groups and proscribed organisations” – Hadi, her husband, was roped in for retweeting some of her posts.

The basis of the NCCIA’s First Information Report (or FIR) was that Mazari and Hadi had claimed that Pakistani security forces were and are behind numerous cases of “disappeared” or missing persons in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and that they had “portrayed the armed forces as ineffective against proscribed groups, including the BLA and TTP.” It was on this basis that Judge Majoka, mentioned earlier, would issue arrest warrants for Mazari and Hadi in November 2025.

The arrests and sentencing of the couple have rightly led to furious condemnation from members of the legal profession, political parties and activists across Pakistan, with some of the responses being:

Completely illegal, unconstitutional and baseless order without any roots in due process, especially as the transfer application is pending in the high court.

[their] only crime is that they consistently spoke up for victims of enforced disappearances and false blasphemy accusations.

[This is a] clear message for others who rise to challenge and question the state.

Amnesty International echoed these sentiments in a tweet, saying that the organisation was:

...alarmed by the manner of the arrest, lack of adherence to due process and by the authorities’ continued pursuit of spurious and retaliatory cases aimed solely at silencing Imaan and Hadi for their human rights work and dissent. This familiar playbook of harassment and intimidation must end.

On Balochistan & Disappearances:

To understand the state’s narrative behind the allegations, arrest and sentencing of Imaan Mazari and Hadi Ali Chatta, we have to look at the state of the insurgency struggle in Balochistan, a resource-rich province that the state of Pakistan is more than anxious to exploit. The struggle in Balochistan is one that is not only fraught with violence, going back to the 1940s in various iterations, on the part of militant insurgent groups, but also at the hands of the Pakistani state, its armed forces and its intelligence agencies.

Though criticism has come from international and local organisations regarding violence from Baloch militant groups, including last year’s hijacking of a passenger train with 214 passengers held hostage, the reality is that there is a compelling body of evidence that highlights and validates the belief that enforced disappearances by the Pakistani state – going back to at least the 1970s – are used to intimidate not just what it views as militants, but political activists as well.

As Natiq Malikzada discusses in her 2025 article in The Diplomat, The True Cost of Enforced Disappearances in Balochistan:

Enforced disappearance – when a person is taken by state agents or those acting with state support, followed by a denial of custody – is a crime under international law. This combination removes the victim from legal protection and leaves families trapped in painful uncertainty, with no clear office or authority to turn to for answers about their loved one. In Balochistan, this is done as part of Pakistan’s counterinsurgency efforts. People are taken from their homes, but also from public markets and roads, then kept without contact for weeks or months. Later, some are reported dead after so-called “encounters” that many in Balochistan, including human rights groups, call a “kill-and-dump”policy.  

Many international human rights groups attribute these abductions to Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps and the Counter Terrorism Department (CTD). The Pakistan Army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) shield these operations by using sweeping counterterrorism powers granted by the state’s permissive laws to detain suspects without charge and keep cases in the dark.

In 2016, the BBC reported on the discovery of over 1,000 bodies of “political activists and suspected armed separatists”, victims of this “kill-and-dump” policy.

As the then-Asia Director of Human Rights Watch Brad Adams (now Executive Director of Climate Rights International) remarked in the HRW article linked above, “The national government has done little to end the carnage in Balochistan, calling into question its willingness or ability to control the military and intelligence agencies.” The title of Human Rights Watch’s 2011 report is stark and clear in backing up Mr. Adam’s remarks: “We Can Torture, Kill, or Keep You for Years’: Enforced Disappearances by Pakistan Security Forces in Balochistan”.

A 2011 report for The Guardian on the conflict in Balochistan, “Pakistan’s Dirty War”, reinforces the horror, along with claims by a military official that militants are using military “uniforms to kidnap people and malign our good name.”

Concerns about “maligning” the “good name” of the Pakistani state and armed forces have also seen attempts by the Pakistani state to reportedly "caution" Pakistani academics and journalists working overseas from “speaking out on politically delicate subjects like the indigenous insurgency in Baluchistan or accusations of human rights abuses by Pakistani soldiers.”

Is it any surprise, therefore, that activists and human rights defenders based in Pakistan would be intimidated and even sentenced to prison for speaking out, coinciding with the reaching of a trade agreement between the US and Pakistan, and where, quote, “most of Pakistan’s reserves are believed to be in the insurgency-hit southwestern province of Balochistan”?

We end with a few words from Rida Hosain's excellent opinion piece for DAWN, Imaan-Hadi arrest and a state at war with dissent:

Imaan and Hadi are among the few lawyers in Pakistan who consistently represent the most vulnerable victims of state abuse, from families of victims of enforced disappearances to those caught up in blasphemy cases. Pakistan’s fear of its human rights defenders is a confession: the truth is more threatening than anything else.

This is not just about two individuals facing legal harassment. It is about the reality that tomorrow it could be any lawyer, journalist, or citizen who speaks out and challenges state excesses.

Sources:

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Hadi Ali Chattha. (2026). Front Line Defenders. https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/profile/hadi-ali-chattha

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