The Punjab government has extended the detention of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) founder Imran Khan’s three sisters — Aleema Khan, Uzma Khan, and Noreen Niazi — by another 30 days, a government lawyer told the Lahore High Court (LHC) on Monday, according to The News International.
The three were originally taken into custody under Section 3 of the Maintenance of Public Order, 1960 (commonly referred to as 3-MPO), a law that allows provincial authorities to detain individuals without trial on preventive grounds. Aleema Khan was detained in Lahore on September 20 and moved to Kot Lakhpat jail; Uzma Khan and Noreen Niazi were detained the following day, September 21, on a police recommendation. The detentions came days ahead of PTI’s planned long march on Islamabad, which the party had originally scheduled for September 27 and later pushed back to October 4 — a sequence PakDaily reported on at the time.
Here is how the case has unfolded since then:
- September 20–21: Aleema Khan, Uzma Khan, and Noreen Niazi are detained under 3-MPO, ahead of PTI’s planned Islamabad march.
- October 19–20: According to the petitioner’s counsel, the original detention orders for the three sisters expire.
- October 20: Shahrez Khan, Aleema Khan’s son, files a petition in the Lahore High Court seeking the recovery and production of his mother and aunts, arguing their detention orders had lapsed.
- October 26: A Punjab government lawyer informs the LHC that the deputy commissioner recommended, and the provincial government approved, a fresh 30-day extension of the detention orders for all three women.
At Monday’s hearing, the Punjab home secretary and the Kot Lakhpat jail superintendent appeared before the court as earlier directed. After reviewing the home secretary’s report, the Lahore High Court disposed of the petition without ordering the sisters’ release or production, noting that the deputy commissioner — the official who had actually issued the detention notification — was not made a party to the case. The court’s order leaves the fresh 30-day detention in place, meaning the three women will likely remain in custody into late November unless the order is separately challenged.
Imran Khan, the former prime minister and PTI founder, has been imprisoned at Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi since August 2023 on multiple legal cases that he and his party describe as politically motivated.
Our Opinion
The repeated 30-day renewal of preventive detention orders against three women with no public criminal charge against them, now stretching past five weeks, sits uneasily with how 3-MPO is meant to be used — as a short-term public-order tool, not an open-ended holding power that can simply be rolled over each time it lapses. The Lahore High Court’s decision to dispose of the recovery petition on a technicality, that the deputy commissioner was not a named party, rather than examine the substance of whether continued detention is still justified, is the kind of procedural outcome that leaves the underlying question unanswered. Pakistan’s courts have an opportunity here to clarify, once and for all, how long a preventive-detention order can be renewed before it needs to be tested on its merits; until that happens, this pattern is likely to recur with the next 30-day cycle.
