Constitutional guarantees ensuring the right to assembly in Pakistan appear to exist solely on paper, with the state regularly enacting legislation aimed at suppressing dissent in the name of “maintenance of public order.”
Any group that protests without prior approval of law enforcement, whether students, laborers, or any other group, risk being branded unlawful and dispersed by force. Several recent cases, political and otherwise, bear witness to this, with demonstrators baton-charged or tear-gassed. Dissent, it seems, is likelier to be seen as a challenge requiring crushing than a democratic demand. The irony is stark: the repression of Pakistan is not a breakdown of law, but law working exactly as intended, a tool for managing labor, protecting capital interests and excluding subaltern voices.
Myth of constitutional guarantees
In When confronted with ground realities, the legal fraternity often claims the denial of rights is the state violating the law. Yet even a cursory analysis of jurisprudence makes clear the law facilitates such oppression. While the Constitution ostensibly grants every citizen the right “to assemble peacefully and without arms,” it qualifies this by allowing “reasonable restrictions … in the interest of public order.” Courts regularly validate the use of state power to curtail any perceived danger to property, life or “public tranquillity,” availing definitions broad enough to encompass any action that the state perceives as disruptive—despite this being the ultimate goal of any protest. In 2020, an Islamabad High Court judge conceded that Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, banning gatherings in urgent situations, infringes upon basic rights. Yet, police routinely utilize this law to prohibit marches or strikes under perceived threats to peace.
Pakistan’s laws require all demonstrations to seek prior authorization of either police or district magistrates, effectively declaring any spontaneous assembly illegal. In this situation, workers’ unions or activists considering an unauthorized protest risk charges of “unlawful assembly” or “public nuisance” under the Penal Code even if entirely peaceful. The constitutional freedom of assembly has thus been hollowed out by subordinate legislation.
The incumbent government has imposed further restrictions over the past year. In September 2024, Parliament approved the Peaceful Assembly and Public Order Act, 2024 for Islamabad, forbidding any public, religious or political gathering of more than 15 people without express permission of the District Magistrate. Even if authorized, a rally can still be banned if officials deem it a threat to “national security or public safety,” or perceive it a risk of “violence or public disorder,” or believe it may disrupt “daily activities of the community.” The government can even declare any part of the capital a high-security “red zone,” forbidding all assemblies. Despite concerns from human rights bodies, including Amnesty International, the law effectively gives the state a blank cheque to treat any dissent as unlawful. Nominally an Islamabad‑only law, its provisions serve as warning to provinces and protesters nationwide.
Labor protest
The intersection of these laws with labor rights is especially worrisome. A constitutional right for Pakistan’s workers to form associations and unions is tightly restricted by statute and regulation. The Balochistan High Court in 2019, for example, applied a colonial‑era service‑conduct rule to cancel the registration of 62 government and private‑sector unions overnight, leaving hundreds of thousands of public‑sector workers without representation. Where the Constitution speaks of “freedom of association,” provincial laws and administrative fiat have often snuffed it out.
Workers who attempt to protest for their rights often face legal action. In 2022, hundreds of employees of a denim factory in Karachi blocked a road and set tyres ablaze over unpaid wages. According to media, police and paramilitary rangers responded by baton‑charging the protesters and shooting bullets in the air to disperse the crowd. Police subsequently claimed the demonstration ended “after negotiations” with management, but one union official lamented “police were protecting the interests of the capitalists by becoming party to industrial disputes.”
Another noted the bitter irony of the government rolling out stimulus packages for factory owners, who forced “starving workers” onto the streets. Similar tales can be found in every city of Pakistan, with employees tear-gassed, beaten or detained for demanding back pay or better facilities. The formal legal duty of the state may be “maintaining public order,” but this duty is in reality interpreted as ensuring industrialists can operate unfettered.
Platforming workers
A newer front in the struggle is the so‑called gig economy. In theory, these millions of app‑based drivers and delivery riders are free entrepreneurs. In practice, they face extreme insecurity. No Pakistani law currently covers platform workers under labor or social‑security codes, as they are classified as independent contractors. If they strike or protest, the state responds much like it does to factory workers: through law enforcement and regulation rather than negotiation. In March 2022, for instance, thousands of Foodpanda delivery riders in Karachi went on strike over steep cuts to pay rates. The app’s own data showed riders were effectively earning less per hour, requiring them to work more for the same pay. The protest briefly brought operations to a halt. Foodpanda’s management accused the strikers of being misinformed, but the police did not arrest or fine the company, instead they monitored the agitation and let it subside on its own.
There is today even a pending law in Islamabad, a “Platform Workers Protection Bill”, intended to impose minimum standards, which suggests the state recognizes a problem. Until such reforms are enacted, however, platform workers remain outside normal labour regulation, and any protest by them is simply left at the mercy of public‑order policing. In other words, the law’s fragmentation allows app‑firms to exploit workers while formal rules treat any collective action by those workers as disruptive. It is a perfect modern example of “structural power” and “legal formalism”: on one hand digital capital casts labor as a pseudo‑commodity to be subcontracted, and on the other the law denies them workers’ rights.
The gig economy also illustrates a wider point about law and protest. Authorities often encourage the fiction that strikes or demonstrations “inconvenience the public”, a trope used equally against Uber drivers as against political marchers. Officials claim a duty to prevent road blockages or “anarchy on the streets.” Yet these very blockades and rallies are precisely the irksome tactics of powerless workers seeking justice in the absence of other recourse. Ironically, when the state invokes Section 144 or other bans to bar a labor rally, it is not an admission of legal impotence; it is proof of law’s potency as an instrument of class power. The system is not failing to hold a “loophole,” it is functioning as designed, keeping labor power fragmented and voiceless.
Pakistan today faces a grim lesson: rights on paper do not translate into rights in practice when power is one-sided. The state has deployed an ever‑expanding toolkit of laws and enforcement to put down public dissent, especially whenever it intersects with workers’ demands. Under successive governments, both civilian and military, laws on assembly, trade unions and public order have been used not to protect citizens but to protect profits and political control. Yet even as the space for protest shrinks, activists continue to resist. Labor leaders call for the repeal of draconian laws, for justice for victims of police excess, and for meaningful dialogue rather than suppression. Their struggle highlights a bitter truth: in Pakistan, the rule of law is not defined by courts or constitutions, but by whose interests are enforced.
The challenge for the future is to break this cycle. Pakistan’s recent policies violate these principles wholesale. Pushing back will require organising despite repression, demanding accountability where there is none, and building solidarity across labor, civil society and political lines. Only by treating the law not as a barrier but as a terrain of struggle, one where workers can force the state to account, can the power of protest be restored. Until then, the policing of protest will remain a stark reminder that in Pakistan, as elsewhere, law often serves to uphold the powerful, not to limit them.