Every time an extrajudicial killing or a horrific case of custodial torture hits the public docket, human rights defenders crowd the airwaves with a predictable lament. They point to a loophole, draft a white paper, and demand more legislation. The recent outcry from groups like the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan regarding the Sheikhupura encounter case follows this exact, tired script. The narrative claims that if we only tweak the wording of the Torture and Custodial Death Prevention Act, accountability will magically follow.
This argument is naive. It mistakes a symptom for a root cause and assumes that law enforcement agencies fail because they lack rules, rather than recognizing that they break rules because impunity is an operational requirement of the current criminal justice ecosystem. Meanwhile, you can find other developments here: When Friendship Breaks at the Border.
The Illusion Of Legislative Fixes
For years, activists lobbied for specialized anti-torture legislation, treating the absence of a dedicated statute as the core failure of the state. When the Torture and Custodial Death Act finally passed, celebrations were short-lived because the needle did not move.
Consider the mechanics exposed by the Sheikhupura case. Two men vanish, turn up dead in a staged police encounter, and are buried without notifying their families. Under the law, mandatory inquiries and independent investigations by bodies like the Federal Investigation Agency should trigger instantly. Instead, years bleed away with zero convictions. To explore the bigger picture, we recommend the detailed article by TIME.
The lazy consensus blames this deadlock on institutional inertia or poor drafting. This analysis ignores how institutional power operates. When an investigative agency tells a high court that hundreds of inquiries produced only a tiny fraction of formal charges due to resource constraints, watchdogs accept this excuse at face value.
Imagine a corporate entity where every internal compliance review yields zero penalties for executive malfeasance. Would you assume the compliance manual lacks sufficient adjectives, or would you conclude that the compliance department answers to the perpetrators?
The state does not suffer from a legislative deficit. It operates under a structural design where the police force functions primarily as an instrument of coercion rather than an agency of public safety. Torture and false encounters persist because they remain the cheapest, fastest way to manufacture compliance and solve cases in a collapsing investigative apparatus.
Why Prosecutors And Investigators Fail By Design
To understand why laws fail, one must examine the baseline incentives of the actors involved. Forensic infrastructure across most local precincts is virtually nonexistent. Detectives receive little to no training in modern evidence gathering, digital tracking, or behavioral profiling.
When an ambitious officer is handed a high-pressure crime rate target with zero forensic tools, physical coercion becomes the default operational standard. Laws passed in air-conditioned parliament halls cannot change the fact that a local precinct officer is expected to produce quick confessions or face professional ruin.
Furthermore, entrusting investigations of law enforcement agencies to external federal bodies sounds great on paper, but it creates a classic jurisdictional standoff. These bodies share institutional DNA, departmental loyalties, and a mutual interest in self-preservation. When the oversight mechanism is dependent on the very administrative machinery it is meant to police, accountability becomes an exercise in theatrical compliance.
Dismantling The Reform Industry Fantasy
The conventional playbook of writing sternly worded press releases, appealing to international conventions, and presenting showcase cases to United Nations committees has yielded decades of failure. International bodies accept state reports showing nominal progress while victims face ongoing violence on the ground.
Fixing this dynamic requires abandoning three comforting myths:
- The Myth Of Better Paperwork: Adding heavier penalties to statutes does nothing when enforcement agencies enjoy absolute procedural shielding.
- The Myth Of Accidental Failure: The breakdown of oversight in custody cases is not an administrative glitch; it is a feature designed to protect institutional power structures.
- The Myth Of Voluntary Reform: Law enforcement agencies will never voluntarily dismantle the mechanisms they rely on for control.
Real change demands structural hostility toward rogue agencies. Until civil society stops treating extrajudicial violence as a legal oversight and starts treating it as an institutional protection racket, every new law will remain nothing more than ink on a worthless page.
Stop drafting amendments. Start stripping immunity.
