Award-winning young human rights lawyer unlawfully arrested and jailed in Pakistan

Imaan Zainab Mazari is one of Pakistan’s more prominent human rights lawyers. She is now in jail with her husband after being arrested and taken into custody last week without a warrant.

Human rights organisations, including Index, are calling for their immediate release.

Mazari, who is only 32, rose to prominence representing journalists, writers, and activists dubbed anti-state and anti-army. She also represented many victims of human rights violations, false blasphemy cases, sexual violence and enforced disappearances in Pakistan.

In June last year, she was honoured with the World Expression Forum (WEXFO) Young Inspiration Award for her extraordinary courage, integrity, and commitment to justice and the rule of law.

Mazari and her husband Hadi Ali Chattha, also a lawyer, were taken by police from car as they were on their way to a sessions court in Islamabad.

The detention came after they had been sentenced to a total of 17 years in jail on multiple charges of disseminating “highly offensive, misleading and anti-state” content in tweets. The couple have denied all charges.

Mazari is well known in Pakistan. She is the daughter of the country’s former minister for human rights, Shireen Mazari, and her late father was the South Asian country’s top paediatrician. She studied law at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 2015.

Her arrest along with her husband has further compounded and intensified Pakistan’s shrinking space for freedom of expression and dissent while raising fresh questions about civil liberties and the increasing power of the country’s powerful military establishment.

Dawn, Pakistan’s most respected and oldest English daily newspaper, criticised the arrest, termed it as “another low point in the history of Pakistan’s justice system”.

The newspaper further stated that: “If such convictions stand, the message to lawyers, journalists and citizens alike is unmistakable: dissent will not merely be discouraged, it will be criminalised’.

Among other cases, Mazari worked on the cases of enforced disappearances of ethnic Baloch being allegedly disappeared at the hands of the state, as well as defending Dr Mahrang Baloch, a vocal activist who advocated for the rights of Baloch in Balochistan; she is also currently in jail.

Mazari also represented journalist Asad Ali Toor who was not only arrested and allegedly beaten up by the Pakistani authorities but is also currently facing travel restrictions due to his journalism. “She proved a constant ‘challenge for the state’, which is why she has been arrested,” Asad Toor said.

In August 2025, the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) filed a case against Mazari and Chattha under the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA). The case is based on tweets published between 2021 and 2025 critical of human rights violations in Balochistan and Khyber Phaktunkwa provinces in Pakistan.

“In 2016, when the PECA was passed during the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) government, it was widely criticised as a tool to suppress dissent,” said Farieha Aziz, who is a co-founder of Bolo Bhi, an advocacy forum for digital rights. “Since then, vague call-up notices and First Information Reports (FIRs) against political workers, journalists, and dissidents have become routine. The accusations almost always involve posting ‘anti-state’ content.”

In Pakistan, lawyers, journalists, politicians, rights activists, and people belonging to different walks of life have widely condemned the couple’s arrest. Her mother, the former Pakistani minister for human rights, called the sentencing “totally illegal”.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent and non-partisan organisation committed to protecting human rights in Pakistan, condemned the arrest while terming the case “a tool to harass, intimidate and ultimately muzzle dissent”.

Amnesty International noted the “lack of adherence to due process” and termed these were “retaliatory cases aimed solely at silencing Ms Mazari and Chattha for their human rights work and dissent”.

Mazari herself has made her own views plain on the state of human rights Pakistan. She reportedly said in court, “Truth seems overwhelmingly difficult in this country.”