Every time a tragedy strikes inside a police station in Lahore, the playbook unrolls with mechanical predictability. Activists scream for probes. International watchdogs draft sternly worded press releases from comfortable offices thousands of miles away. Media outlets parrot terms like systemic failure and institutional impunity.
Human Rights Watch just ran the exact same play regarding the tragic custodial deaths of a woman and a minor girl.
They want an independent investigation. They want accountability. They want commissions.
They are asking the wrong question entirely.
When you demand an investigation into a symptom while ignoring the structural malignancy that creates the disease, you are not fighting for justice. You are participating in theater. I have spent years analyzing governance, state security apparatuses, and municipal policing structures across South Asia. I have watched billions of dollars and countless man-hours poured into oversight bodies that achieve precisely zero.
The lazy consensus says this is a bad apple problem, or a training problem, or a lack of supervision.
It is none of those things. It is the predictable outcome of an investigative infrastructure that relies on coercion because it lacks basic competence.
The Myth of the Independent Probe
Let us look at what Human Rights Watch actually demands. They want high-level judicial inquiries or independent international oversight to investigate custodial violence.
Stop for a moment and examine the mechanics of how police work operates on the ground in urban centers like Lahore.
When an investigation unit lacks forensic laboratories, digitized fingerprint databases, reliable surveillance infrastructure, and basic investigative budgets, what do you think happens when a high-pressure case lands on a desk? The state expects results overnight. The public demands immediate arrests. The politicians demand blood.
Without forensic tools, the interrogation room becomes the forensic lab.
Physical coercion is not just an abuse of power born out of malice; it is structurally incentivized by a system that rewards confessions over evidence. Until you fix the mechanism of evidence collection, every single commission you form is merely counting bodies after the fact.
Imagine a scenario where a local police station is given zero forensic funding, an impossible caseload of four hundred open files per officer, and a commissioner threatening termination if a high-profile theft or murder goes unsolved by Tuesday morning. Do you honestly believe a strongly worded letter from Geneva is going to stop an overworked, terrified, underpaid sub-inspector from crossing the line?
Of course it will not. Blaming individual officers without addressing the starvation of the investigative apparatus is like blaming a sinking ship's crew for using buckets while you refuse to patch the hull.
Why Oversight Commissions Are a Waste of Time
We love commissions in this part of the world. Whenever a scandal breaks, the establishment forms a committee. Retired judges are appointed. Secretaries are assigned. Reports are written. Heavy files are bound in red tape and shelved in air-conditioned archives.
Nothing changes.
Human Rights Watch treats these commissions as silver bullets. They treat the word probe as a functional policy solution. But an investigation is not an intervention. A report is not a reform.
When you call for a probe into custodial deaths without simultaneously demanding the total dismantling of the archaic station diary system, the mandatory installation of timestamped interrogation room cameras linked to independent servers, and the legal criminalization of non-forensic investigative methods, you are performing public relations for a broken system. You are giving politicians an out. They get to nod solemnly, announce a judicial inquiry, wait out the news cycle, and go right back to business as usual.
The uncomfortable truth is that the domestic legal framework already has enough laws on the books to punish custodial murder. Section 302 of the Pakistan Penal Code and various police order provisions are crystal clear about illegal detention and homicide. The law is not missing. The enforcement mechanism is not missing because of a lack of legal definitions.
It is missing because the entire hierarchy of the state depends on a compliant, terrified populace, and the police are the blunt instrument used to maintain that compliance.
Dismantling the Convenience of Outrage
It is easy to sit in an air-conditioned room in New York or London and write a condemnation. It generates retweets. It satisfies donors. It checks a box for an annual report.
It does not save a single life in Lahore.
If Human Rights Watch and local civil society want to stop custodial deaths, they need to stop calling for inquiries and start demanding radical technical obsolescence.
- Abolish custodial interrogation without a magistrate and defense counsel present. The moment you introduce friction into the interrogation room, the incentive for physical violence drops toward zero.
- Mandate digital evidence standards. If a confession is the primary currency of a prosecution, physical torture will always remain the primary currency of an investigation. Force prosecutors to rely on DNA, cell site analysis, and financial tracing.
- Decouple policing from political influence. In Lahore, station house officers are often posted based on political patronage rather than merit. When an officer answers to a local politician rather than the rule of law, institutional accountability becomes impossible.
Until we tackle these structural realities, every press release demanding a probe is just noise designed to make the international NGO sector feel productive while the morgues keep filling up.
Stop asking for investigations. Demand a complete rewrite of how the state gathers facts.
Anything else is complicity disguised as activism.
