SEVENTY-year-old Safiya Bibi, shaking and sobbing behind a thick mesh grill, pleads incoherently to be sent back home. She suffers from severe cognitive decline and has little sense of where she is or why. But how did a woman who set out for umrah end up in Adiala Jail?

Her memory comes in fragments — only that a man, claiming to love her like his own mother promised her a free pilgrimage to Makkah. First, he said, she would stop in Sri Lanka for a knee replacement, so her frail legs wouldn’t fail her during the sacred rites. On the way to the airport, she was given pills to prevent motion sickness. As soon as she landed, she was pulled aside by security and taken into custody on drug charges. For six years, Safiya languished in a Sri Lankan prison — forgotten, sick, and slowly losing her grip on reality.

Last year, she was among 56 Pakistanis repatriated through the interior ministry’s efforts. But their homecoming offered no freedom — they were simply transferred from one prison to another.

In Sri Lanka, these individuals, including Safiya, were serving life sentences for carrying varying quantities of drugs — some as little as a few hundred grams. To put it into perspective, had Safiya been sentenced in Pakistan, her punishment would only have been seven to 10 years.

For six years, Safiya languished in a Sri Lankan prison.

This discrepancy gives rise to a grave injustice: when prisoners return to Pakist­­an, there is no clear mechanism to reassess or adjust their sentences to make them compatible with Pakistan’s law. Since 2012, 189 prisoners have been repatriated from Sri Lanka — once they land, the authorities, hav­ing checked the box of bringing them home, wash their hands of what happens next.

The 56 repatriates now fight their battle in the Islamabad High Court. Their representative from Justice Project Pakistan notes: “Without a clear process for reviewing and adjusting foreign sentences, repatriated prisoners remain in limbo — their detention a continued violation of their fundamental rights.”

According to Justice Project Pakistan, there are some 23,056 Pakistanis imprisoned abroad. Without access to lawyers, impartial translators, and adequate consular assistance, they are left unable to navigate legal proceedings, exposed to unduly harsh punishments. This abandonment star­­kly contrasts with what the law requires of the state.

Our Constitution doesn’t stop at the border. It imposes on the government an obligation to protect the fundamental rights of its citizens — wherever they may be. The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations says that whenever a citizen is arrested in another country, their embassy must be notified — and that embassy has the right to visit, to talk, and to help arrange a lawyer.

While Pakistani consulates do strive to provide assistance, there is no binding, uniform policy that regulates the scope and quality of assistance. In this vacuum, consular protection remains arbitrary and at individual consulates’ discretion, rather than a legal obligation.

Safiya and the other 55 victims of drug trafficking — accused of carrying drugs many of them had unknowingly transported — maintain that the high commission, in lieu of legal support, advised them to confess despite their innocence.

Such botches are not isolated. They stem from a systemic absence of legal safeguards. Had Pakistan had a binding legal framework for consular protection in place, their stories would have played out differently. In 2010, following orders from the Supreme Court, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued guidelines instructing its missions abro­­­ad to maintain regular communication and visits with detai­ned Pakistani nationals, and keep records of each case. But these efforts fell short. In 2017, Justice Ayesha Malik, then at the La­­hore High Court, de­­emed the guidelines inadequate and dir­e­cted the ministry to draft a comprehensive policy. Years later, that policy still hasn’t materialised and the protection of Pakistani citizens abroad remains patchy, inconsistent, and dangerously unreliable.

However, there now appears to be a growing will to confront this long-neglected issue. On International Migrants Day in December 2024, the National Commission for Human Rights and Justice Project Pakistan brought together key stakeholders from the judiciary, parliament and civil society. Participants unanimously committed to working towards a consular protection law and improving mechanisms for repatriated prisoners.

Thousands of Pakistanis remain trapped in foreign jails, and many who return face prolonged confinement — forgotten and fri­ghtened. The petition currently before the Islamabad High Court is a chance to make this right — not just for these 56 prisoners, but for every Pakistani the state has left behind.

The writer is a legal specialist at Justice Project Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, June 17th, 2025