Federal Shariat Court Invalidates 2022 Amendment, Restores Section 325 PPC
In the landmark case Hammad Saeed Dar v Federation of Pakistan (2026), the Federal Shariat Court (FSC) struck down the 2022 amendment that had removed Section 325 of the Pakistan Penal Code and its corresponding entries in the Criminal Procedure Code. This decision effectively recriminalises attempted suicide in Pakistan, reversing a brief period of decriminalisation. The ruling has sparked intense debate about the role of criminal law in addressing suicide, with critics arguing that it fails to account for modern understandings of mental health and social causation.
Harm Principle and Criminal Justice: A Flawed Foundation?
The FSC's judgment relies heavily on religious and moral reasoning, but it does not adequately engage with the principles of criminal justice, particularly the harm principle articulated by John Stuart Mill. Mill argued that criminal law should only intervene when a person's conduct causes or risks causing harm to others. Suicide attempts primarily harm the individual, not others, which typically justifies decriminalisation. However, as legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart noted, the instrument of law can produce injustices. The harm principle is useful for deciding when law may intervene, but it is insufficient for determining culpability, especially when the offender's mental state and motives are central.
The FSC acknowledged that suicide attempts may sometimes harm the community—for example, in cases of cults, terrorism, or public violence. However, such exceptional cases should not define the general rule. The law already has tools to address terrorism, abetment, or coercion. It does not follow that every survivor of a suicide attempt should be treated as a criminal accused. Criminal justice must distinguish between a person who deliberately harms another and a person whose own life has become unbearable.
Culpability and Mental State: The Inward Look
A more just approach would look inward at the state of mind of the person attempting suicide. In most cases, the individual is not acting with free, rational, and blameworthy agency. Instead, the person may be driven by despair, abuse, debt, humiliation, isolation, mental distress, family pressure, or collapse of social support. Criminal justice, if it is to remain just, must differentiate between a contract killer and a woman who ends her terminally ill husband's suffering out of compassion. Similarly, a suicide attempt often arises from unbearable circumstances, not criminal intent.
The FSC's reliance on the exemption for mental incapacity is insufficient. This exemption typically requires a medically recognised condition of unsoundness of mind, but many suicide attempters do not meet that strict legal threshold. Their acts may still stem from profound despair, poverty, shame, unemployment, or institutional neglect. As Emile Durkheim's seminal work on suicide demonstrates, suicide is not merely a personal moral failing but often a societal failing.
Durkheim's Sociological Perspective: Social Integration and Dysfunction
Durkheim's theory of social integration explains that suicide rates rise when individuals feel disconnected from society (egoistic suicide) or when they are overwhelmed by oppressive social expectations (altruistic suicide). In Pakistan, social institutions such as family, economy, and education often become dysfunctional. A young man who loses his job and cannot support his family faces a clash between social expectation (masculinity as provider) and economic reality. A girl trapped in an abusive household experiences the family as a site of control rather than protection. A student who fails an exam is treated with disgrace, turning education into a source of shame.
These dysfunctions are aggravated in Pakistan, where suicide rates are particularly high among young people. The FSC's judgment does not address these root causes. Instead, it offers a punitive response that may deepen the rupture between the individual and society. Criminalising suicide attempts tells the individual, already failed by social bonds, that the State will meet him not with care but with accusation.
Punishment vs. Prevention: The State's True Responsibility
The debate between punishment and prevention is central here. Punishment is administratively convenient: define the act as an offence, attach a sanction, and presume the problem is solved. Prevention requires the slower, more difficult work of building mental-health infrastructure, accessible counselling, domestic violence protection, economic support, educational reform, crisis helplines, and trained hospital protocols. Criminalising suicide attempts offers the appearance of action without doing the work that prevention demands. A policy that relies on punishment while leaving the causes of despair unattended is doomed to fail.
Criminal prosecution should remain the last resort of the State. The criminal law is the harshest expression of public power, bringing police intervention, stigma, expense, fear, and the possibility of imprisonment. In cases of attempted suicide, where the person is already standing at the edge of social and psychological collapse, prosecution should not be the State's first instinct. A legal system that reaches too quickly for the criminal file risks mistaking vulnerability for deviance and suffering for guilt.
The Fragility of Deterrence in Suicide Cases
The case for deterrence is equally fragile when applied to suicide attempts. Deterrence assumes a subject who can measure consequences, weigh punishment against action, and step back from the offence. But the person we are dealing with is often standing at the edge of self-annihilation. The fear of punishment may deter those who still possess ordinary fear of consequences; it is far less likely to deter someone whose thinking has already been impaired by despair, abuse, humiliation, or mental distress. Deterrence is premised on fear, and fear is premised on the ability to understand the scale of devastation that may follow. A person in such a state may not be able to process that knowledge or calculate the risks involved.
What criminalisation may produce, instead, is case attrition: families may hide the attempt, hospitals may hesitate, and survivors may be pushed further away from help before the system can even respond. The State cannot be indifferent to suicide, but prevention is not prosecution. If suicide is shaped by isolation, abuse, poverty, and mental distress, criminal law remains too blunt a response. A survivor should be met first with care, not accusation. A legal system committed to saving life must ask whether criminalising agony helps anyone live.
