HUMAN RIGHTS CELLS IN PAKISTAN: BRIDGING CONSTITUTIONAL GUARANTEES AND GRASSROOT REALITIES

Abstract

If one lives in a rural area of Pakistan — say, Rahim Yar Khan or Tharparkar — and something has gone seriously wrong, maybe he/she is a bonded laborer, maybe she is a minority woman facing discrimination — the Supreme Court is not really an option for him/her. Article 184(3) exists, and law students learn about it, but practically speaking it is not accessible to most ordinary people. What one might actually encounter, if he tries to get help from the state at all, is something called a human rights cell. Most Pakistanis have probably never heard of these cells, which is interesting because there are actually a lot of them. They exist inside police departments, district offices, provincial ministries, and at the federal level inside the Ministry of Human Rights. So on paper it looks like Pakistan has taken this seriously. But the cells are underfunded, they do not have enough staff, and more importantly they cannot actually force anyone to do anything. That last point is the one this article is mainly concerned with. Pakistan's Constitution has strong language about fundamental rights. Articles 9, 14, and 25 protect life, dignity, and equality. These are not vague provisions — they are specific guarantees. The problem this article is trying to work through is the gap between what those provisions promise and what actually happens when someone tries to use the state machinery to enforce them at the local level. This article looks at that gap. The research draws on legal analysis of the relevant provisions, policy documents, reports from civil society organizations, information obtained through Right to Information requests, and findings from Parliamentary committees. The argument it makes is maybe a bit counterintuitive: the cells are not failing just because they lack resources. The argument is that they were designed in a way that more or less guarantees they will not work. They have no adjudicatory power, meaning they cannot make binding decisions. They have no real independence from the government bodies they are supposed to hold accountable. And there is no mechanism that forces them to report on what they are actually doing. What they end up doing instead is absorbing complaints — giving people somewhere to go — without actually creating any obligation on the state to respond. To make this argument more concrete, the article compares Pakistan's approach to two other countries. India passed the Protection of Human Rights Act in 1993, which created a different kind of institutional structure. South Africa went even further and embedded its human rights institutions directly into the Constitution in what are called Chapter 9 institutions. Neither system is perfect, but both reflect deliberate design choices that Pakistan has consistently not made. Looking at what those countries chose to do, and what Pakistan chose not to do, helps clarify what is actually missing here. The article ends with some recommendations. These are meant to be practical and to take into account the post-Eighteenth Amendment structure of Pakistan, where a lot of authority has moved to the provinces. The basic point is that if fundamental rights are going to mean something outside the courtroom — for people who cannot afford lawyers or who live far from Islamabad — then the human rights cell needs to become an institution with real power. At the moment it is closer to a place where complaints get filed and then forgotten.