Published: 03:54 PM, 05 July 2026
Criminalising Agony – Why Pakistan’s Revival Of Section 325 Is A Step Backward
In Hammad Saeed Dar v Federation of Pakistan (2026), the Federal Shariat Court (FSC) invalidated the 2022 amendment that had removed Section 325 PPC and its corresponding CrPC entries, thereby restoring the criminalisation of attempted suicide in Pakistan.
Let us address the elephant in the room at the outset. In Pakistan, any discourse carrying even a hint of religion often risks losing the profundity the matter deserves. The room suddenly becomes full of elephant and leaves little space to talk about anything else. So, let us take the elephant out of the room for a while and try to explore the underpinnings of the matter more deeply, using different frameworks of sociology and criminal justice.
The FSC's ruling does not sufficiently take into account the principles and objectives of criminal justice. Rather, in its practical consequences, it stands in contravention of them. The unique social fabric of any society guides the criminal justice system to sanction and achieve its principles and objectives, respectively. Therefore, a judgment of this nature cannot only be measured by the formal revival of an offence. It must also be measured by what the offence does in society: how it operates in hospitals, police stations, families, and in the already fragile minds of those who survive an attempt at self-destruction.
The harm principle is widely used in many jurisdictions to administer justice. John Stuart Mill espouses that criminal law is justified mainly when a person’s conduct causes, or risks causing, harm to others. This principle is often used to justify the decriminalising of suicide attempts because they primarily cause risk or harm to oneself. The fact that the harm principle is widely accepted does not mean that it produces a just result every time. As H.L.A. Hart says, the instrument of law has the potential to produce injustices. The harm principle is useful in deciding when the criminal law may intervene, but it is not always sufficient in deciding culpability, especially where the offender’s mental state, motives, and surrounding circumstances are central to the act.
"Criminal justice, if it is to remain just, must distinguish between a person who deliberately harms another and a person whose own life has become unbearable"
Hereby, I tend to agree with the FSC to the limited extent that a suicide attempt may, in certain exceptional circumstances, be used in a manner that causes harm to the community at large, such as in cases of cults, terrorism, or public violence. Thus, a suicide attempt may sometimes be a case where the harm it brings is both to oneself and to others. But such exceptional cases should not define the general rule. Where a suicide attempt forms part of terrorism, coercive cult activity, public violence, abetment, or manipulation, the law already has tools to respond. It does not follow that every survivor of a suicide attempt should be treated as a criminal accused.
What then can be a better way of dealing with the matter of suicide attempts? Instead of only looking outwards towards harm, one should also look inwards towards culpability. Offenders vary according to their states of mind. Suppose that one case involves a woman who kills her suffering and terminally ill husband, while the other is a contract killing; the two will be punished in different ways, and for good reason. The harm is the same, but the offender's motives, and hence level of culpability, differ enormously. Using the harm principle alone in this case may produce an unjust result if it ignores the difference between the mental states of the two actors.
Similarly, if we look inwards, i.e., at the state of mind of the person attempting suicide, we may, in most cases, find reasons to reduce culpability rather than impose it. A person attempting suicide is not always acting with the kind of free, rational, and blameworthy agency that criminal punishment ordinarily assumes. The person may be acting under despair, abuse, debt, humiliation, isolation, mental distress, family pressure, or a collapse of social support. Criminal justice, if it is to remain just, must distinguish between a person who deliberately harms another and a person whose own life has become unbearable to himself.
Emile Durkheim’s work on suicide is seminal in explaining the causes of suicide. His main thesis is that suicide is not merely a personal moral failing; it is rather, in many cases, a societal failing. I respectfully disagree with the FSC’s reliance on the exemption provided by the law of Pakistan to people having mental incapacity. This exemption is often associated with medical science and requires a medically recognised condition of unsoundness of mind to be relied upon. However, mental incapacity is one limited factor. Many people who attempt suicide may not fall within the strict legal threshold of unsoundness of mind, but their act may still arise out of despair, abuse, poverty, debt, shame, unemployment, social isolation, or institutional neglect. As Durkheim also posits, there are a range of socio-economic and institutional failings that play a part in the rise of suicide rates.
Social dysfunction is what impedes the normal functioning of society. Society works through institutions such as family, community, economy, education, religion, and more. The failings of these institutions make an individual feel abandoned, trapped, or disconnected. A young man loses his job during an economic crisis. He cannot support his family. Society has taught him that masculinity means earning, providing, and maintaining honour. But the economy gives him no opportunity to fulfil that role. This is not merely a private failure. It is a dysfunction between social expectation and social reality. A girl is trapped in an abusive household or forced marriage. The family, which should be a source of protection, becomes a site of control. Society’s institution of family becomes dysfunctional because it produces fear instead of care. A student grows up in a society where exam failure is treated as disgrace. Education, which should develop the person, becomes an instrument of shame and anxiety. These effects become much more aggravated in our society, where the state of affairs is bleak. In Pakistan, the suicide rate is particularly high among young people.
Durkheim also explains suicide through the idea of social integration, i.e., the extent to which an individual feels connected to family, community, religion, work, and other social institutions. When this integration is too weak, the individual is left abandoned and isolated; when it is too strong, he may be swallowed by oppressive expectations of honour, obedience, sacrifice, or conformity. Suicide, then, often emerges where the relationship between the individual and society becomes disturbed. In our context, a person may be alone despite living within a family, or suffocated precisely because of it. Criminalising his attempt only deepens this rupture. It tells the individual, already failed by social bonds, that the State too will meet him not with care but with accusation.
This also brings us to the old debate between punishment and prevention. Punishment is administratively convenient because it gives the State a quick answer: define the act as an offence, attach a sanction, and presume that the problem has been dealt with. Prevention, on the other hand, requires the slower and more difficult work of the State: mental-health infrastructure, accessible counselling, domestic violence protection, economic support, educational reform, crisis helplines, and trained hospital protocols. Criminalising suicide attempts therefore offers the appearance of action without doing the work that prevention demands. A policy that relies on punishment while leaving the causes of despair unattended is, by design, doomed to fail. Criminal prosecution should also remain the last resort of the State. The criminal law is not an ordinary administrative tool; it is the harshest expression of public power. It brings with it police intervention, stigma, expense, fear, and the possibility of imprisonment. In cases of attempted suicide, where the person is already standing at the edge of social and psychological collapse, prosecution should not be the State’s first instinct. A legal system that reaches too quickly for the criminal file risks mistaking vulnerability for deviance and suffering for guilt.
The case for deterrence is equally fragile when applied to suicide attempts. It assumes a subject who can measure consequences, weigh punishment against action, and then step back from the offence. But the person we are dealing with is often standing at the edge of self-annihilation. The fear of punishment may deter those who still possess the ordinary fear of consequences; it is far less likely to deter someone whose thinking has already been impaired by despair, abuse, humiliation, or mental distress. Deterrence is premised on fear, and fear is premised on the ability to understand the scale of devastation that may follow. A person in such a state may not be able to process that knowledge or calculate the risks involved. What criminalisation may produce, instead, is case attrition: families may hide the attempt, hospitals may hesitate, and survivors may be pushed further away from help before the system can even respond.
The State cannot be indifferent to suicide, but prevention is not prosecution. If suicide is shaped by isolation, abuse, poverty, and mental distress, criminal law remains too blunt a response. A survivor should be met first with care, not accusation. A legal system committed to saving life must ask whether criminalising agony helps anyone live. (By, Abdul Rehman Ghouri)
>> Source: Friday Times
