From Complaint to Sentence: Bottlenecks and Reform in Pakistan's Criminal Justice System, with Evidence from Islamabad (2019–2026)
Abstract
Pakistan's criminal justice system is usually discussed one institution at a time: the police, the courts or the prisons. This article follows a case through the whole pipeline, from the first complaint to the final sentence and the prison cell, and asks where cases are lost, delayed or distorted. We use qualitative document analysis of official statistics, institutional reports and news coverage published between 2019 and October 2026, with a focus on the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT). Sources include reports of the Law and Justice Commission of Pakistan, the National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR), Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), police statements, parliamentary briefings and reporting from Dawn, The Express Tribune, Arab News, the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) and other outlets.
Four findings stand out. First, recorded crime in Islamabad depends heavily on whether complaints become First Information Reports (FIRs), so rises and falls in police figures cannot be read at face value. Second, strong police claims about detection sit beside very low conviction rates in several categories of offence; in 2024 Islamabad reportedly recorded seven convictions in 176 rape cases. Third, court capacity is thin: more than two million cases are pending in district courts nationwide, 1,153 district courts are without judges, and 29 of them are in Islamabad. Fourth, the pipeline ends in overcrowded prisons holding 110,513 people at 160.6% of capacity, about three-quarters of them awaiting trial. We argue that these problems are connected, and we propose reforms that treat the system as a chain.
Keywords: criminal justice system; Pakistan; Islamabad; First Information Report; conviction rate; pretrial detention; prison overcrowding; court backlog; gender-based violence; document analysis
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23300363
