EDITORIAL: The Senate Functional Committee on Human Rights, along with some civil society and human rights organisations, has denounced remarks made by Justice Ali Baqar Najafi in the Noor Mukadam case, underlining, among other things, the fact that His Lordship’s comments have sparked a widespread controversy.
It is, therefore, deeply unsettling — and frankly, alarming — that a senior member of the country’s highest court would choose to frame a brutal, premeditated murder in the language of “morality” rather than law. The horrific beheading of Noor Mukadam was not an abstract social dilemma; it was a violent crime whose clear and direct cause was the perpetrator’s own actions.
For Justice Ali Baqar Najafi to issue an “additional note” that drifts into moralisation by ascribing the crime to the “vice spreading in the upper society which we know as living relationship [sic]”, is to shift attention away from the central legal issue of individual criminal responsibility and onto the victim herself. When an apex court judge implies, even indirectly, that the victim’s choices played a role in her own murder, it reinforces exactly the kind of regressive thinking that fuels gender-based violence in the first place. It may be plausibly argued that justice must remain tethered to law, not to personal morality.
When judges depart from legal reasoning to indulge in victim-blaming narratives, they not only do injustice to the individuals involved but also weaken the broader struggle for women’s rights and equality.
In a country where women already face extraordinary levels of harassment, coercion, and naked violence, the judiciary must be the institution most firmly anchored in impartial, rights-based reasoning. Any lapse, such as in the present instance, sends a dangerous message to society, normalising the idea that a woman’s autonomy — her relationships, movements, and decisions — can be scrutinised to justify or mitigate the violence done to her.
It bears emphasising that Justice Najafi’s ‘additional’ remarks did not arise from the evidentiary record, nor were they relevant to the legal questions before the bench. They were personal views, rooted in a prescriptive moral framework rather than constitutional or criminal law.
The honourable judge ought to have not lost sight of the fact that the validity of a law does not necessarily depend on its moral content, and maintaining the stability and predictability of the legal system is always paramount for an apex court in particular.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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