Justice by bullet: Do Pakistanis still need courts?

Two accused men died in encounters this week. Pakistanis cheered. Now a harder question: if bullets deliver faster justice than courts, do we still need judges?

WEBDESK – MEDIABITES

Pakistan had a productive week for justice, if by justice you mean two accused men are dead and nobody had to sit through a trial.

Nauman, the fraudster who allegedly swindled a family of nine million rupees with a fake Harvard admissions scheme and drove young Laiba Ejaz to suicide, was shot dead by his own associates, officials say. In Multan, contractor Tauqeer, who allegedly ran over a minor child with his vehicle, met a similar fate, also at the hands of people who apparently knew him well enough to kill him.

The public reaction was immediate, warm and entirely uncomplicated: justice served, case closed, next.

And now, emboldened by this efficiency, ordinary Pakistanis are asking a question that constitutional lawyers may find professionally threatening: do we actually need the courts?

The economic argument

Pakistan’s judiciary runs on substantial public money. High Court judges receive generous salaries, housing, transport and security. Cases drag on for years, and in some instances, decades. Families of victims spend fortunes on lawyers, adjournments and paperwork, only to watch accused men walk free on bail and repeat the cycle.

Compare that to this week’s model: allegation, encounter, resolution. No bail hearings. No adjournments. No expensive advocates. From a purely fiscal standpoint, the encounter is remarkably cost-effective.

The small print

The encounter model has one minor design flaw: it assumes the person killed was actually guilty.

Courts exist, with their delays, protocols, and tedious procedures, precisely because the state has, on occasion, been wrong about who did what. Evidence can be planted. Confessions can be coerced. The man shot in an encounter cannot, from that point forward, present new information.

Nauman may well have been exactly what he was accused of being. Tauqeer may have done exactly what he was alleged to have done. But “may well have been” is not the standard a functioning legal system applies before ending a human life. It is the standard a lynch mob applies.

The question nobody is asking

When a man is killed by “his own associates,” two things are simultaneously true: the accused is dead, and nobody has been charged with killing him.

If the law does not apply to the accused, it is worth asking why anyone believes it will reliably apply to everyone else.

The courts are flawed. The alternative being cheered this week is flawless only because it leaves no one alive to appeal.

Laiba Ejaz deserved justice. So did the child in Multan. The question is whether what happened this week was justice, or just the appearance of it, at a price we haven’t finished paying yet.