About The Project

If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected — those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most — and listens to their testimony.

James Baldwin from “No Name In The Street”

This work is an individual’s exploration of the state of the law in Pakistan, its disconnect from the people of the country, the factors that alienate the legal system from the citizenry, and the battles being waged by communities to extract their rights. Covering a vast expanse of the nation’s social and economic geography, the work turns the public’s gaze to the lived realities of some of Pakistan’s most marginalized and weak communities – the very ones most in need of the protections of a just and fair state judicial and legal system.

It places at its center the voices of those who are furthest from the concerns of the formal legal system, but involved in some of the most determined struggles to gain its attentions. It explores how social and economic injustices and inequalities are a result of specific political and economic design, and how State law has been used to entrench and maintain these injustices and inequalities. It makes the connection between policy and law, and its consequences for the lived realities of Pakistani citizens.

Vicovian in design, the work is built on the belief that State law isn’t something that works independent of the interests of the State and of power, but in fact is a critical means by which specific political, policy, class, and power interests are imposed and maintained. The deprivations, exploitation, impoverishment and marginalization that we see around us, is a consequence of these interests.