The presumption of innocence is a practice, not a phrase

The phrase appears in almost every criminal judgment: the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. It is recited so often that it has acquired the texture of furniture — present, unremarked, and rarely tested for weight. But the presumption of innocence is not a decoration for the final paragraph of a judgment. It is a discipline, and like every discipline it exists only while someone is practising it.

Consider what happens to an accused person in a white-collar matter in Pakistan before any evidence is tested. His name may be placed on the Exit Control List under the Exit from Pakistan (Control) Ordinance, 1981, ending his ability to travel for work. His accounts may be frozen. His arrest, if it comes, will be photographed. Investigating agencies hold press conferences; charge-sheets are summarised on television with the confidence of verdicts. His employer suspends him, his bank quietly reclassifies him, and his children learn about the case from their classmates. All of this precedes trial. Much of it precedes the framing of a charge. If the trial ends in acquittal — as of early 2026, years later is a fair estimate — nobody holds a press conference about that.

The Constitution addressed itself to exactly this. Article 10-A, inserted by the Eighteenth Amendment in 2010, makes fair trial and due process a fundamental right. Article 4 promises the protection of law to everyone. Article 13(b) protects an accused against being compelled to be a witness against himself, and Article 14 protects dignity. The architecture is sound. The pressure on it is constant.

Where the presumption erodes

The erosion rarely announces itself as injustice. It arrives as procedure. A reverse-onus provision here: in an assets-beyond-means case under the National Accountability Ordinance, 1999, once the prosecution shows assets disproportionate to known sources of income, the accused must account for them — a structure the 2022 amendments adjusted but did not abolish [current text of sections 9(a)(v) and 14 after the 2022–2024 amendments — TO BE VERIFIED BY REVIEWING LAWYER]. A pre-trial deprivation there: remand sought as routine, an ECL placement made mechanically, a freezing order granted on a one-sided record. Each step has a lawful form. Stacked together, they amount to punishment served in advance, on credit, against a conviction that may never come.

The second engine of erosion is publicity. A trial tests evidence under the Qanun-e-Shahadat, 1984, where the burden sits on the party who asserts (Article 117) and every document must be proved. A media trial tests nothing. It runs on leaks, and its verdict is delivered in the first week and never revisited. We tell clients a hard thing early: you cannot win the media trial, and trying to win it usually damages the real one. Every press statement is a prior statement. Every televised explanation, given without the record, is material for cross-examination years later.

The third engine is the quiet complicity of institutions that should know better. Boards that treat an employee's call-up notice as a finding. Banks that treat an FIR as a conviction. Professional bodies that suspend first and inquire afterwards. None of these actors is bound to wait for a verdict, but all of them are choosing, when they act, how much of the presumption survives outside the courtroom.

Practising it

Inside the courtroom, the presumption is kept alive by unglamorous work. The defence lawyer who refuses to concede an element because conceding it would be polite. The insistence that a photocopied bank statement be proved properly, that a recovery witness actually attended the recovery, that the prosecution's chronology hold together hour by hour. Superior court jurisprudence has long held that in offences outside the prohibitory clause of section 497 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, bail is the rule and refusal the exception [leading authority — CITATION — TO BE VERIFIED], and that bail is not to be withheld as punishment. Those propositions have force only when someone stands up and claims them, matter after matter, without apology.

Outside the courtroom, the practice belongs to everyone else. To the general counsel who resists filing a criminal complaint as a negotiating tactic — because every unfounded FIR spends down the credibility that genuine complaints need. To the editor who writes "accused" and means it. To the board that distinguishes between an allegation that requires suspension and one that requires only distance. The presumption of innocence is not the property of criminal lawyers. It is a habit a legal system either keeps or loses, and it is kept in a thousand small decisions by people who will never appear in a law report.

We hold no brief for wrongdoing. Fraud exists; corruption exists; some of the people we act for are eventually convicted, and the system is entitled to convict them — on evidence, after trial. That last clause is the entire point. A conviction after a fair trial dignifies the law. A punishment served before one degrades it, and degrades it for the innocent and guilty alike, because at the moment the punishment is inflicted, no one yet knows which is which.

What this means for you

If you are accused: say nothing in public, move immediately against the pre-trial deprivations — bail, ECL, freezing orders — and treat every early statement as one you will meet again at trial. Silence is a right under Article 13(b), not an admission. If you employ someone accused: decide what the allegation actually requires, in writing, rather than reaching for the maximum response. And if you are merely watching a scandal unfold on television, remember that the presumption of innocence is tested precisely when it is least convenient. That is the only time it means anything.