ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2011, two incidents of coldblooded violence took place at the hands of law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in Pakistan. One incident involved the killing of a group of foreigners/aliens traveling across the Pakistan–Afghanistan border, and the other involved the killing of a citizen in an area under curfew in the metropolitan city of Karachi. On one hand, the Supreme Court of Pakistan took a Suo Moto action in the case of the latter incident, while remaining silent on the former. On the other, the Pakistani government, instead of reviewing the powers of LEAs, increased them by passing new security laws in the following years. In this article, I focus on these two incidents of violence to question how/why aliens are treated differently from citizens in the Pakistan’s criminal justice system. I trace the legal genealogy of that differential treatment and highlight the different stages of its growth. I also throw light on the way lethal force was used on the victims to show the drawbacks in the operational side of law enforcement. Finally, I engage critical theory to understand the nature of this violence, which now resides in the structure of the legal regime of security.
