Punjab Extends Detention of Imran Khan’s Sisters by 30 Days, Lahore High Court Told

The Punjab government has extended the detention of Imran Khan’s three sisters by another 30 days, the Lahore High Court was told on Monday 26 October 2026. Aleema Khan, Uzma Khan and Noreen Niazi remain in custody at Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore, more than five weeks after they were first detained under preventive-detention powers ahead of a planned protest by Imran Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI).

According to The News, a government lawyer submitted a report prepared by the Punjab home secretary to the court in connection with a petition seeking the release of the three women. The lawyer told the court that the Lahore deputy commissioner had sent a proposal to the Punjab government recommending a further extension of their detention, and that the government had approved the proposal and extended the detention by another 30 days. The extension had been granted on 7 October, the government lawyer said, according to The News.

The hearing did not produce the release order the petitioners had sought. After reviewing the home secretary’s report, the court disposed of the petition filed by Shahrez Khan, the son of Aleema Khan, who had challenged the continued detention of his mother and her two sisters. The petitioner’s counsel, Rana Mudassar Umar, had asked the court to order that the three women be recovered and produced before the court. The court observed that the detention notification had been issued by the deputy commissioner, but that the petitioner had not made that official a party to the case, and that it could not issue an order beyond the scope of the petition before it.

That procedural point, narrow as it sounds, is the hinge on which the case turned on Monday. The court did not rule on whether the detention itself was justified. It did not endorse the government’s reasons, and it did not reject them. It closed this particular petition because of how it had been framed, leaving the detention in place and leaving the door open to a differently framed challenge. Whether such a challenge follows, and how the court responds to it, is now the most consequential unanswered question in the case.

How the detentions began

Aleema Khan was detained on 20 September in Lahore under Section 3 of the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance, 1960, and shifted to Kot Lakhpat Jail, according to The News. A day later, her sisters Noreen Niazi and Uzma Khan were detained under the same provision, known in Pakistan as 3-MPO, following a recommendation from the police. The detentions came ahead of a PTI nationwide protest, including a planned long march on Islamabad on 27 September to demand the release of Imran Khan and what the party described as the supremacy of the Constitution.

The march did not take place as originally planned. It was postponed, first to allow talks and then, according to earlier reporting, to 4 October, as the confrontation between the PTI and the federal government intensified and the authorities moved to prevent demonstrators from entering the capital. The sisters, however, stayed in custody. Their initial 30-day detention orders expired on 19 and 20 October, the petitioner’s counsel told the court at an earlier hearing, according to The News. The government’s position, as presented on Monday, was that the detention had already been extended on 7 October, before those orders expired, on the deputy commissioner’s recommendation.

Shahrez Khan filed his petition in the Lahore High Court on 20 October, challenging the detention. At the previous hearing, the court had summoned the Punjab home secretary and the superintendent of Kot Lakhpat Jail to appear in person. According to The News, both officials appeared before the court in line with its order, and the court disposed of the petition after considering the home secretary’s report. Reporting by Pakhtun Digital and other outlets confirms the same sequence: the extension was disclosed in court, the judge heard the petition, and the petition was disposed of without a release order.

Justice Abher Gul Khan heard the petition. During the proceedings, the petitioner’s counsel said he was aware that the 26th and 27th Constitutional Amendments could pose legal hurdles in the matter, according to Pakhtun Digital. The court observed that it could not go beyond the scope of the petition. The hearing therefore ended not with a finding about liberty or public order, but with a finding about procedure: the wrong respondent had been named, and the remedy sought did not fit the case as filed.

What the law allows, and what it does not settle

Section 3 of the Punjab Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance, 1960, gives the government power to direct the arrest and detention of a person where it is satisfied that doing so is necessary to prevent that person from acting in a manner prejudicial to public safety or the maintenance of public order. The text of the Ordinance allows the government to extend the period of detention from time to time, for a period not exceeding six months at a time. The 30-day extension disclosed on Monday sits well within that outer limit on paper. The legal argument, however, has never been only about the outer limit. It has always been about the reasons given, the evidence relied on, and whether a court can test them.

Preventive detention is, by design, detention without a criminal conviction. No crime needs to have been committed, and no trial needs to have taken place, for an order to be made. The government must be “satisfied” that detention is necessary. That is a lower threshold than proof beyond reasonable doubt, and it is precisely why the power has been controversial for as long as it has existed. Human Rights Watch, in its reporting on the use of the Ordinance, has described it as broadly and vaguely worded, allowing the government to arrest and detain suspected persons for up to six months, and has recorded its use against lawyers, political activists and protesters. The Ordinance traces its origins to the colonial legal system, and it was retained and strengthened after independence. Successive governments, of every political colour, have used it against their opponents, and successive oppositions have denounced it — until they have held power themselves.

Pakistani courts have, over the years, set limits on how the power may be used. Legal scholarship on preventive detention in Pakistan records cases in which courts have set aside detention orders based only on general allegations, on previous criminal cases in which the detainee had been granted bail, or on political affiliation alone. In one case cited in that scholarship, a court held that a detention order did not fit the statutory requirement of Section 3 where the detainee had been detained only because of political affiliations and a relationship with a political party. Those rulings do not decide the present case. They do, however, explain why the framing of a challenge matters so much, and why the question of who issued the order, and on what material, is not a technicality. It is the substance of judicial review of preventive detention.

The reference to the 26th and 27th Constitutional Amendments during Monday’s hearing points to a second, larger legal context. The 27th Amendment, enacted after passage through Parliament and presidential assent, created a new Federal Constitutional Court and altered the balance between the Supreme Court and the new court on constitutional questions. Its supporters have presented it as a reform to promote institutional harmony and clarify jurisdiction. Its critics, including two Supreme Court judges who resigned after its passage, have described it as an assault on judicial independence. The petitioner’s counsel did not, on the reporting available, argue the full merits of that debate in this hearing. He flagged the amendments as a potential hurdle. That flag matters because it signals that future challenges to detention orders may have to navigate a changed constitutional landscape, in which the forum for constitutional questions, and the scope of what courts may examine, is itself contested.

The political context the courtroom cannot ignore

The detention of Imran Khan’s sisters cannot be understood apart from the wider confrontation between the PTI and the state. Imran Khan, the PTI founder and prime minister from 2018 to 2022, has been in jail since August 2023 and faces a series of cases which he and his party say are politically motivated. His sisters have become among his most visible public advocates, appearing at protests, speaking to the media, and pressing for access to him in Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi. Their detention, days before a planned march, was widely read — by the PTI and by its supporters — as an attempt to remove the march’s most recognisable organisers and spokespeople from the streets.

The PTI has condemned the prolonged detention. According to reporting of the party’s reaction carried by The Hindu, PTI leader Moonis Elahi described the detention as politically motivated. The party has also presented figures for the length of time Imran Khan and his wife, Bushra Bibi, have spent in custody, and has demanded regular meetings with family, lawyers and party leaders, as well as medical care for Imran Khan. Those figures are the party’s claims, and they should be read as such. What is not in dispute is the political charge of the case: the detention of the family members of an imprisoned opposition leader, under preventive powers, in the middle of a protest movement, is a political act with legal form, whatever the legal merits of the individual orders.

The government’s stated rationale has been public order. The detentions were made, on the government’s account, to prevent disruption ahead of a planned protest and march on the capital, at a time when the authorities had erected barriers and deployed large numbers of police to block access to Islamabad. That rationale is the one the Ordinance requires the government to hold: a satisfaction that detention is necessary to prevent action prejudicial to public safety or the maintenance of public order. The government has not, in the reporting of Monday’s hearing, publicly set out the specific material on which the deputy commissioner’s recommendation and the 7 October extension were based. That absence is not unusual in preventive-detention cases, where the material is often placed before the court rather than published. It is, however, the reason the case turns on judicial scrutiny: without it, the public cannot test whether the threshold in the Ordinance was met.

The wider backdrop has grown more fraught since the sisters were first detained. On 11 October, the federal government imposed emergency and governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the only province led by the opposition, suspending the PTI-led provincial government and taking its chief minister, Sohail Afridi, into preventive custody. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan demanded an end to that intervention on 25 October, calling the detention of the elected chief executive a grave affront to democratic norms. That demand was the subject of a separate report on this site. The two stories are legally distinct — one concerns a province, the other three individuals in Punjab — but they share a pattern: the use of emergency and preventive powers against the PTI, and the use of the courts as the forum in which those powers are tested.

Analysis: procedure decided the day, but it did not settle the argument

The most important thing to understand about Monday’s hearing is what it did not decide. It did not decide that the detention of Aleema Khan, Uzma Khan and Noreen Niazi is lawful. It did not decide that it is unlawful. It decided that this petition, as framed, could not produce the order the petitioners wanted, because the official who issued the detention notification had not been made a party to the case. That is a real legal reason, and it is the kind of reason that frustrates observers who want courts to decide the merits. But it is also the kind of reason that shapes the next step: a fresh petition, naming the deputy commissioner, would put the merits squarely before the court.

The second point to grasp is the timing. The extension was granted on 7 October, according to the government lawyer, but it was disclosed in open court on 26 October, after the original orders had, on the petitioner’s account, expired. That sequence will invite scrutiny. If the extension was validly made on 7 October, then there was no gap in lawful authority, and the expiry dates of 19 and 20 October are beside the point. If, on the other hand, the extension was made later, or on inadequate material, then the period between expiry and disclosure becomes legally significant. The reporting available does not resolve that question. It records the government’s assertion of a 7 October date, and the petitioner’s assertion that the orders had expired. A court examining the actual notification, with its date and reasons, would be able to resolve it. The public, on the present record, cannot.

The third point is about the human dimension, which the legal language tends to obscure. Three women have now spent more than five weeks in Kot Lakhpat Jail without being convicted of any offence in this matter. Preventive detention is not imprisonment after trial. It is detention on the basis of what the government believes a person might do. That is a power democracies grant sparingly, and it is a power that requires, in return, prompt and effective judicial oversight. When oversight is delayed by procedure, or when the forum for oversight is itself in flux, the balance the law is supposed to strike tilts towards the state. That is the concern human rights groups have raised about the Ordinance for decades, and it is the concern that gives this case significance beyond the three individuals involved.

There is also a gendered dimension that should not be ignored. The detention of women family members of a political leader, ahead of a protest, carries a particular symbolic weight in Pakistan’s political culture, where women relatives have often been the public face of movements when male leaders are imprisoned. Aleema Khan, in particular, has been a prominent and combative presence in the campaign for her brother’s release. Her detention, and that of her sisters, removes that presence from public view. The government may have had public-order reasons. The political effect, whatever the reasons, is the silencing of three of the most audible voices in the PTI’s campaign.

Why it matters

This case matters for three reasons, each broader than the fate of one petition. The first is the precedent it sets for the use of preventive detention against political families. If detention orders against relatives of opposition leaders can be extended for 30 days at a time, on the recommendation of a deputy commissioner, with only limited judicial scrutiny of the underlying material, then the Ordinance becomes a tool for managing protest movements rather than a last resort against a proven threat to public safety. That is the criticism levelled at the Ordinance by its opponents, and it is a criticism that gains force with each extension that goes untested on the merits.

The second reason is institutional. Pakistan’s judiciary is in the middle of a profound reordering. The creation of the Federal Constitutional Court, the resignations of senior judges, and the debate over the 26th and 27th Amendments have left the question of which court decides constitutional questions, and on what terms, unsettled in practice even where it is settled on paper. A detention case that turns on procedure, in a court whose jurisdiction is being redefined, is a test of whether the system can still deliver the most basic function of judicial review: a prompt answer to the question of whether a person should be free.

The third reason is political. The PTI’s protest movement has been repeatedly delayed, dispersed and detained. Its leader is in jail, its provincial government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has been suspended, and now its founder’s sisters remain in custody. Each of those facts, taken alone, can be explained in legal terms. Taken together, they describe a political environment in which the space for opposition activity is narrowing. The government’s answer is that it is maintaining public order in the face of a movement that has threatened disruption. The opposition’s answer is that public order is being used as a pretext for political suppression. The truth of that dispute cannot be settled by assertion. It can only be settled by evidence, tested in court, in public. Monday’s hearing did not provide that test. The next one might.

What to watch next

1. Whether a fresh petition is filed naming the Lahore deputy commissioner as a respondent, and whether the Lahore High Court then examines the 7 October extension order, its reasons and its supporting material on the merits.
2. Whether the Punjab government publishes or places before the court the specific grounds for the extension, beyond the general public-order rationale reported so far, and whether the court requires it to do so.
3. Whether Aleema Khan, Uzma Khan and Noreen Niazi remain at Kot Lakhpat Jail for the full further 30 days, or whether any further order, release or transfer intervenes before that period expires.
4. How the PTI responds politically, including whether it renews its protest plans, and whether the detention of the sisters becomes a rallying point in its campaign for Imran Khan’s release.
5. Whether the wider constitutional argument flagged in court — the effect of the 26th and 27th Amendments on challenges to detention — is developed in a future hearing, and which court is asked to decide it.

Sources

• The News — Detention of Imran Khan’s sisters extended for another month, LHC told
• Pakhtun Digital — Imran Khan’s Sisters’ Case Takes an Unexpected Turn at LHC
• Burak Digital — Imran Khan’s Sisters Face 30 More Days in Detention
• Human Rights Watch — Laws Used to Detain Protestors, including the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance
• Punjab Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance, 1960 — text of Section 3