Journalist Hafiz Husnain Raza is now a free man. Or, rather he is out on bail after an Anti-Terrorism Court acquitted him of eight related charges. Picked up back in April 2016, Raza’s story is sadly not an unusual one. He, along with Daulat Jan Mathal, were named by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in 2017 as two Pakistani journalists among 262 worldwide who had been jailed for doing their work. To date, Mathal remains in custody. At the heart of the two men’s detention is talking truth to power — which is the job of the fourth estate. In Raza’s case, he had been working as the Okara correspondent for daily Urdu newspaper, Nawa-i-Waqt. He covered local land disputes extensively but is said to have run into trouble when reporting on one between local farmers and the Okara Military Farms (OMF). Raza’s grave ‘mistake’ was coming out in support of the Tenants Association of Punjab (Anjuman-e-Muzareen, AMP), which represents landless peasants throughout the province. And by standing with the weak, who have been denied their right of land allocation since 1999 and who had been made to pay rent in cash on this following a contractual change introduced by Gen Musharraf back in 2004, Raza had inadvertently positioned himself directly in confrontation with Pakistan’s powerful military establishment. And while the argument may be made that journalists cross professional boundaries when they pick a side — we, here at Daily Times, would argue that calling out those who deny others their fundamental rights, and at times use brutality along the way to do so, is, in actual fact, upholding the tenets of the fourth estate. Daulat Jan Mathal, an editor and publisher found himself dangerously out of favour when he printed material supporting national autonomy for Gilgit-Baltistan. Such arbitrary detention cannot go on. It ought to be a matter of great shame for the Pakistani state. Meaning that while it pays homage to the democratic process — by way of the recent Senate elections and the imminent transfer of civilian power for just the second time in the country’s history — this amounts to little more than casual tokenism. For how can it be anything else when it is complicit in going after journalists when it should be channelling all efforts into going after real terrorists? Before sign off, however, we would like to mention Al Jazeera journalist Mahmoud Hussein, who has spent 447 days in an Egyptian prison. Without. Charge. * Published in Daily Times, March 14th 2018.