May 23, 2025
ISLAMABAD – In the aftermath of the Supreme Court verdict in the Noor Mukadam case, a glimmer of accountability emerges from the shadows of impunity.
When the Supreme Court of Pakistan upheld Zahir Jaffer’s death sentence on May 20, 2025, it did more than merely reaffirm a lower court’s decision; it offered a rare and momentous assertion of legal accountability in cases of gender-based violence.
The Court’s unequivocal stance against the use of mental illness as a shield for premeditated brutality, and its refusal to bow to elite pressure, marked a vital precedent in Pakistan’s legal history. For women across the country, this decision holds both symbolic and structural significance. It signals that, however fragile or infrequent, there remains an institutional capacity for justice within Pakistan’s highest judicial forum.
A precedent against patriarchy
The Noor Mukadam case has, from its inception, transcended the boundaries of an individual crime. It became a sociopolitical parable: both a mirror and a battleground.
Noor’s status as the daughter of a former diplomat underscores the brutal truth that in Pakistan, privilege offers no inherent protection from patriarchal violence. Whether by a husband, brother, romantic partner, or friend, women of every socioeconomic class navigate a landscape of danger.
Yet the case also reveals a second, more paradoxical dynamic of privilege — one that ultimately facilitated this rare instance of justice. Noor’s family, bolstered by social capital and political access, refused to compromise. They rejected hush money, resisted societal pressure to remain silent, and pursued the legal route with resilience. In a system where most women’s cases dissolve into procedural inertia or social coercion, the Mukadam family’s perseverance altered the trajectory of what might otherwise have been another unrecorded statistic. This is not to suggest replicability — most families lack such resources — but rather to acknowledge that power, when aligned with principle, can still disrupt entrenched patterns of impunity.
The age of virtual resistance
Tuesday’s Supreme Court verdict must also be understood within the broader sociotechnical context in which this case unfolded.
From 2021 onwards, Noor’s case galvanised an extraordinary wave of online activism. Hashtags such as #JusticeForNoor and #SayHerName proliferated across platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram, transforming public grief into digital mobilisation.
Pakistani women and allies used social media not only to express rage and solidarity but to build pressure on institutions long characterised by inertia. In a context where conventional routes to justice are often inaccessible or ineffective, the digital sphere emerged as a crucial arena of feminist activism as documented in Mursrat Yasmin’s research paper — through archiving memories, amplifying voices, and demanding accountability.
This phenomenon also reflects a broader evolution of digital citizenship in Pakistan. The convergence of grief, memory, and mobilisation online, particularly among urban youth and and a subset of women, demonstrated the immense potential of social media to generate counter-publics. These online collectives resisted attempts to deflect blame, demanded transparency in court proceedings, and even critiqued the weaponisation of mental illness in legal defences.
Per the study, the online terrain, once dismissed as ephemeral, has proven itself capable of sustaining momentum, translating hashtags into headline pressure.
Beginning of vindication, not victory
In this regard, Zahir Jaffer’s legal strategy was especially adverse. His lawyers invoked the concept of mental illness, hoping to exploit a domain that remains grossly misunderstood in Pakistan. Where depression, trauma, and psychosis are colloquially reduced to “woh pagal hai,” the courtroom becomes a space vulnerable to manipulation. Yet, the Supreme Court decisively rejected this line of reasoning — refusing to conflate mental illness with moral absolution. This rejection is not only a legal outcome; it is a normative intervention in how mental health and criminality intersect in public discourse.
To be clear, structural justice for women in Pakistan remains elusive. Rape conviction rates continue to hover at a dismal 0.5 per cent, and the majority of survivors never report assaults, deterred by social stigma, institutional apathy, and the likelihood of retraumatisation. According to the Sustainable Social Development Organisation’s 2024 report, in 2024 alone, over 32,000 cases of gender-based violence were reported, yet conviction rates for rape, kidnapping, and domestic abuse remained below 1pc.
Noor’s case is an anomaly. But it is a powerful one.
That a man as wealthy and socially connected as Zahir Jaffer could not evade conviction, even after deploying every legal and psychological defense at his disposal, is a significant statement. That the Supreme Court refused to bend under pressure, and did so publicly and emphatically, offers a rare moment of jurisprudential clarity.
From a sociological perspective, the verdict also creates what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu might call a shift in the “symbolic capital” available to women in Pakistan’s public discourse. Symbolic capital — prestige, honour, or recognition — can alter one’s social position in ways that transcend economic class. For a woman listening to the verdict in a remote area or reading about it online, this moment can act as an affective and symbolic resource, helping her reframe what is imaginable in her own fight for justice. The reinforcement of legal accountability, public solidarity, and media support may not immediately alter lived realities, but it can gradually reconfigure the cognitive maps through which justice, resistance, and survival are interpreted, as Bourdieu writes in The Forms of Capital.
Justice in Pakistan is neither routine nor guaranteed. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), an estimated 56pc of women who have experienced physical or sexual violence have neither sought formal help nor confided in anyone about their ordeal — something we hope to change in the coming years.
Tuesday’s verdict, shaped not only by legal arguments but also by a mobilised civil society and a digitally active public, suggests that the arc of justice, while often obstructed, can still bend in the right direction. For Pakistani women, that is not victory, but it is, perhaps, the beginning of vindication.
The author works as a management consultant in Pakistan’s development sector.