Your Rights As A Citizen

The 1973 Constitution of Pakistan has 280 articles. You do not need to read all of them. You need to know about ten by name. Today we focus on three that you will use repeatedly in adult life: Article 19 on freedom of expression, Article 25 on equality, and Article 25A on the right to education. These are not gifts from the state. They are limits on the state, written down in 1973 by elected representatives of every province, including the people of East Pakistan who became Bangladesh two years earlier.

Article 19 says every citizen has the right to freedom of speech and expression, and there is freedom of the press, subject to reasonable restrictions imposed by law in the interest of the glory of Islam, the integrity of Pakistan, public order, decency, morality, contempt of court, and incitement to an offence. That is a long list of exceptions, and Pakistani courts have spent fifty years arguing about how wide each exception goes. The practical lesson: you can criticise government policy, you can criticise individual ministers, you can publish journalism. You cannot incite violence, you cannot defame an individual without truth as defence, and you should be careful around blasphemy law, which is governed by sections 295 to 298 of the Pakistan Penal Code and is one of the most weaponised laws in the country.

Article 25 says all citizens are equal before the law and entitled to equal protection of the law. There shall be no discrimination on the basis of sex alone. Nothing in this article prevents the state from making any special provision for the protection of women and children. The same article sits behind every domestic violence law, every Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Act 2016, every Sindh Domestic Violence Act 2013. When women lawyers cite Article 25, they are pointing at the constitutional ground beneath these statutes. The state is allowed to favour the historically disadvantaged in order to make equality real.

Article 25A was added in 2010 by the 18th Amendment. It says the state shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years in such manner as may be determined by law. This is the constitutional anchor for every government school in Pakistan. Around 22 million Pakistani children are still out of school, mostly girls, mostly in rural Sindh and southern Punjab and Balochistan. Article 25A is unfulfilled. But it is binding. NGOs like the Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi and Alif Ailaan use 25A to file public interest litigation against governments that close schools or fail to build them.

When a right is violated, you have three escalation tiers. First, write to the institution that violated it, formally, and demand a remedy in writing. Second, file a complaint with the relevant Ombudsman. Pakistan has a Federal Ombudsman, a Federal Tax Ombudsman, a Banking Mohtasib, and Provincial Ombudsmen. Their offices accept complaints free of charge and decide within 60 days. Third, file a writ petition in the High Court under Article 199 of the constitution. Each tier is more expensive in time and money. Most rights violations are resolved at tier one or tier two if the citizen is patient and writes well.