There is a moment in every serious criminal trial — and I have lived through enough of them to know this with certainty – when the prosecution’s case does not collapse because the law failed. It collapses because a police officer touched something he should not have. Because a sample was transferred without a receipt. Because no one thought to photograph the scene before the crowd moved in. Because the chain of custody, that invisible thread connecting a crime to its consequences, was broken somewhere between the street and the courtroom – quietly, carelessly, and often irreversibly.
In Pakistan’s criminal courts, that moment comes with devastating frequency. And when it comes, it does not merely damage a case. It damages the survivor who reported it, the witness who came forward despite fear, the family that waited years for a verdict, and the broader public whose faith in the justice system erodes a little further each time a perpetrator walks free — not because he was innocent, but because the evidence against him was handled as though it did not matter.
It has mattered to me, professionally and personally, for the entirety of my legal career. Which is why the notification of the Crime Scene Units (CSUs) Punjab Forensic Science Authority Rules, 2026 — published through an extraordinary issue of The Punjab Gazette on April 13, 2026 — deserves far more attention than it has yet received.
Let me be direct about something that lawyers in this country rarely say plainly in print: the failure of forensic evidence management in Pakistan is not a mystery. It is not a puzzle that requires new research or fresh inquiry. It is a known, documented, systemic failure that has persisted for decades because no one in a position of authority was legally obligated to fix it. First responders arrived at crime scenes with no formal duty to preserve them. Evidence was collected — when it was collected at all — by officers with varying degrees of training, using whatever materials were at hand, with no standardised documentation requirement. Samples travelled from scene to laboratory through chains of custody so informal that they barely deserved the name. Medico-legal reports were filed, lost, misfiled or presented in court in conditions that made them legally unreliable.
In sexual assault cases — the category of crime I want to focus on specifically, because it sits at the intersection of the two major legislative instruments Punjab has now enacted — these failures were not merely procedural inconveniences. They were, in many instances, the reason why conviction rates remained stubbornly, shamefully low. A survivor would report. An FIR would be registered. A trial would begin. And then, at some point in the proceedings, the forensic foundation would give way — and with it, the case. I have seen this happen. Many of my colleagues have seen this happen. And for years, we argued in academic papers, bar council discussions and courtroom submissions that what Pakistan needed was not just better laws protecting survivors, but better laws governing the science that would prove what was done to them.
The CSUs PFSA Rules 2026 are, at their core, an answer to that argument. Issued under Section 22 of the Punjab Forensic Science Authority Act 2025 and signed into force by Secretary Muhammad Asif Balal Lodhi, these rules do something that sounds simple but is, in the context of Pakistan’s legal landscape, genuinely transformative: they make forensic rigour a legal obligation, not an administrative aspiration. The rules establish Crime Scene Units at divisional headquarters and district levels across Punjab, creating a dedicated forensic infrastructure that is institutionally distinct from the general police function. The crime scene investigator — now formally defined as a forensic expert responsible for evidence collection, packaging, preservation and transportation — is no longer a police officer doing their best with limited training. They are a specialist, bound by law, whose every action at a crime scene is governed by enforceable standards. For a practising criminal lawyer, the significance of that shift cannot be overstated.
The rules specify the offences that must be attended by a crime scene investigator, and the list is worth reading carefully — not just for what it includes, but for what its inclusions signal. Homicide, suspicious deaths, robbery above Rs. 5 million, terrorism, explosions, acid attacks — these are, in one sense, the expected entries. But nestled within that list, at clause (c), are two words that carry the weight of an entire legislative philosophy: sexual assault. The mandatory deployment of a forensic crime scene investigator to every scene of rape or sodomy is not a procedural detail. It is a statement. It says that sexual violence cases in Punjab will henceforth be treated with the same forensic seriousness as terrorism, homicide and organised crime. It says that the physical evidence in these cases — the evidence that has historically been the difference between conviction and acquittal — will be collected by a trained specialist, documented to a legal standard, and preserved in a manner that can withstand the scrutiny of cross-examination.
Read alongside the Anti-Rape (Victim and Witness Protection) Rules, 2025 — which protect survivor identity from the moment of FIR registration, allow testimony via audio-visual link, mandate child-sensitive court environments and prohibit media from publishing victim details — and a coherent legislative architecture begins to emerge. One set of rules protects the person giving evidence. The other protects the evidence itself. Together, they address both of the structural weaknesses that have historically allowed sexual violence cases to fail in Pakistani courts. As a criminal lawyer, I find this alignment genuinely encouraging. It suggests that whoever designed these instruments understood that survivor protection and forensic integrity are not separate policy objectives — they are two sides of the same coin.
I want to dwell on the chain of custody provisions, because in my professional experience, this is where cases are most often lost and most rarely recovered. The rules establish that all evidence must be handed over under proper receipt, with formal sealing and in strict compliance with the PFSA’s standard operating procedures and quality assurance manuals. Where the crime scene investigator personally transports and submits evidence, they are formally recorded as the submitter, with the receiving unit formally recorded as the receiver. The name, rank, service number, unique identification code and signatures of every official who handles the evidence must be documented on the exhibit sheet. This is, for Pakistan, a significant legal development. It creates a named, traceable, legally documented record of every human hand through which a piece of evidence passes — a record that a prosecution can present in court, and that a defence can scrutinise, challenge and, if it holds, cannot credibly attack.
From a defence perspective — and I say this as someone who has appeared on both sides of criminal proceedings — a robust chain of custody does not disadvantage the accused. It protects them too. An accused person has every right to know that the evidence against them has not been tampered with, fabricated or mishandled. The new rules, by mandating transparency and documentation at every step, serve the interests of justice rather than the interests of any particular party. Justice, after all, is not a prosecution tool. It is a standard to which every participant in a criminal proceeding — including the state — must be held.
The provision placing preservation responsibility on the first responding law enforcement agency is, in my view, one of the most practically significant in the entire framework. The window between a crime being reported and a forensic specialist arriving at the scene has historically been one of the most legally dangerous periods in any investigation. It is in this window that well-meaning but untrained officers disturb evidence. It is in this window that curious bystanders are sometimes allowed proximity to the scene. It is in this window that the physical record of what happened begins, sometimes irretrievably, to degrade. By placing a formal, enforceable duty on the first responder to preserve the crime scene from arrival through to the completion of evidence collection, the rules transform that dangerous window into a zone of legal accountability. An officer who fails in this duty is no longer merely negligent in an administrative sense. They are in breach of a formal legal obligation, with consequences that flow from that breach. For prosecutors preparing cases, this matters enormously. It means that by the time a crime scene investigator arrives and begins their formal work, the scene they are working with should — legally, at minimum — be in the condition it was when the first officer arrived. That is a standard Pakistan has never formally imposed before. It is long overdue.
The rules also require investigators to conduct photography, videography, sketching and detailed written notes at every crime scene, capturing its condition exactly as found. All identified evidence must be labelled, packaged, sealed and formally documented, with every sealed package carrying a comprehensive set of identifying information — the crime scene number, exhibit number, type of offence, the precise date and time of collection, a description of the item, its exact location within the scene, a suggested analysis number, the investigator’s name and signature, and the relevant FIR number and police station details. It is, in essence, a forensic audit trail — one that begins at the moment evidence leaves the ground and must remain unbroken all the way to the laboratory and, ultimately, to the court. Evidence must further be transported in purposely built, security-equipped vehicles, submitted to formally established evidence receiving units at divisional and district levels, and recorded at every point of transfer with the name, rank, service number and signature of every official involved. The informality that has long characterised evidence handling in this country has, at least on paper, been formally abolished.
I would not be honest, or useful, if I concluded this piece without acknowledging the distance between legislative intent and practical reality in Pakistan’s justice system. Rules, however well drafted, do not implement themselves. The CSUs PFSA Rules 2026 envision a Punjab in which every serious crime scene is attended by a trained forensic specialist, where evidence is meticulously documented and securely transported, where chains of custody are maintained with bureaucratic precision, and where evidence receiving units at divisional and district levels are properly staffed, equipped and operational. That Punjab does not yet fully exist. Building it will require investment in forensic training, equipment, infrastructure and institutional culture that goes well beyond the gazette notification of a set of rules. It will require the PFSA Authority to develop, disseminate and enforce the standard operating procedures and quality assurance manuals that the rules repeatedly reference. It will require police leadership to treat the preservation obligation as a genuine legal duty rather than an inconvenient formality. And it will require the legal community — prosecutors, defence lawyers and judges alike — to hold the new framework to account in court, demanding compliance rather than accepting the old habits.
That is, ultimately, where practitioners like myself have a role to play. Rules create the framework. Courts enforce it. And it is in the daily work of litigation — in the challenges we raise, the standards we demand, the failures we refuse to overlook — that legal reform either becomes real or remains aspirational. A gazette notification, however landmark, is only the beginning. Its true value will be measured not in the pages of the Punjab Gazette, but in the verdicts that Punjab’s courts deliver in the years ahead.
I have spent my career in the criminal administration of justice arguing, in various forums and in various ways, that Pakistan’s legal system is not broken at the level of its laws. Our statutes, when carefully read, often contain the architecture of a just system. What has been broken, repeatedly and at great human cost, is the machinery between the law on paper and the justice in practice. The CSUs PFSA Rules 2026 — alongside the Anti-Rape (Victim and Witness Protection) Rules, 2025 — represent a serious, substantive attempt to repair one of the most critical components of that machinery. They deserve to be studied carefully, implemented faithfully and enforced rigorously.
For every survivor who has watched their case unravel in court because of a broken evidence chain, for every family that has waited years for a verdict that never came, and for every prosecutor who has stood before a judge knowing the science should have been there but was not — these rules matter. They are not the end of the journey. But they are, unmistakably, a meaningful and long-overdue step in the right direction. The crime scene, for too long treated as a formality on the road to a courtroom, must now be treated as the courtroom’s foundation. Punjab has, at last, put that principle into law.
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