Pakistan’s use of military courts to try civilians has become one of the country’s most serious ongoing human rights concerns. Human rights organizations warned in May 2026 that the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling upholding such trials severely undermined the rights to liberty and fair trial by allowing civilians to be prosecuted in secret proceedings before military officials who are neither independent nor impartial.
This crisis did not begin this year. For years, human rights groups have argued that Pakistan’s military courts operate outside the safeguards required under domestic and international law, especially when civilians are prosecuted for non-military offences. Reports have documented opaque proceedings, lack of transparency, coerced confessions, and convictions arising from deeply unfair trials, while legal experts and rights monitors have repeatedly called for such cases to be returned to the ordinary justice system.
The concerns go even further. The International Commission of Jurists has reported that proceedings before Pakistan’s military courts fall far short of fair trial standards because hearings are secret, judgments are not properly reasoned, public hearings are not guaranteed, and meaningful appeals before civilian courts are absent. The same body and other rights monitors have also highlighted allegations of torture, ill-treatment in detention, harassment of family members, and broader patterns of abuse surrounding these prosecutions.
These patterns show that the issue is not only about jurisdiction, but about a wider structure of impunity. When civilians are removed from open courts and placed into closed military proceedings, due process is weakened, public scrutiny disappears, and abuses become easier to conceal. This is why international human rights standards treat the trial of civilians by military courts as, at most, a highly exceptional measure rather than a normal instrument of justice.
Pakistan’s authorities should immediately end the trial of civilians before military courts and return all such cases to ordinary civilian courts capable of ensuring due process, transparency, and independent judicial oversight. The rule of law cannot survive where exceptional tribunals are used to bypass fundamental rights and shield abusive practices from scrutiny.
As Rights Defenders Initiative (RDI), we condemn the ongoing unlawfulness of civilian trials before Pakistan’s military courts and the wider human rights violations associated with them, including secret proceedings, denial of fair trial rights, torture, ill-treatment, and intimidation of families. These practices must end immediately, all civilians must be removed from military jurisdiction, and the Pakistani authorities must uphold their obligations under international human rights law without exception.
References
- https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/05/pakistan-authorities-must-end-ongoing-injustice-of-civilian-trials-by-military-courts/
- https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/05/31/pakistan-dont-try-civilians-military-courts
- https://www.icj.org/pakistan-military-justice-system-reflects-a-glaring-surrender-of-human-rights/
- https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/05/pakistan-civilians-must-not-be-tried-under-military-laws/
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/31/hrw-urges-pakistan-to-not-try-civilians-in-military-courts
