The Federal Shariat Court’s ruling on attempted suicide has reopened an old wound in Pakistan’s legal conscience. By striking down the 2022 repeal of Section 325 of the Pakistan Penal Code, the court has restored a colonial offence that treated a person who survived self-harm as an accused person before they could be treated as a patient. The bench held that decriminalisation was repugnant to Islam, and there can be no quarrel with the principle that Islam protects life and forbids its destruction. The real quarrel, nonetheless, lies elsewhere: whether the protection of life is served by dragging a broken person into the criminal process.
Like it or not, Section 325 was a British penal provision drafted in an age when the state believed punishment could discipline almost every form of human distress. Going by health advocates’ estimates, around 20,000 Pakistanis die by suicide annually, with far larger numbers attempting it or thinking about it. These figures are already uncertain because suicide remains among the most underreported tragedies in the country. Families call it an accident, and the medico-legal system too often turns private grief into yet another avenue for exposure. The poor, as usual, are left with the worst bargain.
The court was right to worry that decriminalisation should not become a loophole for abetment, coercion, online manipulation, cult-like exploitation or political theatre. No serious reformer should argue otherwise. The law must punish those who push another person towards death, and it must deal firmly with instigators, predators and organised networks. Yet that is not the same as punishing the survivor, especially when Pakistan’s Penal Code already contains provisions on abetment and incitement, and Section 84 recognises unsoundness of mind as a defence.
This is where Parliament failed the country in 2022. Repeal was morally sound, but legislatively thin, because it should have been followed by measures like hospital protocols, police non-interference rules, emergency psychiatric assessment and provincial suicide registries.
The public-health evidence is not on the side of criminalisation. The World Health Organisation estimates that about 727,000 people died by suicide in 2021, with nearly three-quarters of these deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries, and suicide was the third leading cause of death among 15- to 29-year-olds. Decriminalisation does not magically reduce despair. However, it does make reporting, treatment and follow-up less frightening for those already trapped between shame and silence.
Allowing this debate to be framed as religion versus mental health is both lazy and dangerous, as it insults both faith and evidence. Islamic jurisprudence places preservation of life among its highest aims, while mercy, repentance, incapacity, intention and social obligation are not foreign ideas imported by NGOs, but part of our own legal and moral inheritance. A state that claims to protect life must ask why so many citizens reach a point where life itself becomes unbearable. *