First published in Minute Mirror on 26 May 2026. Reproduced here by the author; a link to the original appears below.
The opinions expressed are the author's own and do not necessarily represent the views of Minute Mirror.
Some things should still be said without qualification: judicial data is not paperwork. It is the memory of the state. It shows how a country defines rights, resolves disputes, and limits authority. What changes the equation is AI. Once judicial data is fed into these systems, it does not remain where it was created. It moves. It is absorbed into models. It begins to influence legal tools, risk assessments, and decision-making processes far beyond its origin, often without the knowledge or consent of the state it came from. This is not a distant concern. It is already happening.
This reality has become more urgent as artificial intelligence enters courtrooms and legal practice around the world. AI tools now assist in summarising judgments, sorting dockets, drafting arguments, and conducting legal research. The promise of efficiency is real, particularly in Pakistan, where more than two million cases remain pending across the judiciary. But efficiency cannot come at the cost of judicial independence, constitutional control, or data sovereignty.
The risk is simple. Many AI tools used informally by lawyers, judges, researchers, and court staff are foreign-built and hosted outside Pakistan. When a judgment, pleading, order, or legal question is uploaded to such a platform, the data may leave the jurisdiction. It may be retained, processed, analysed, or used to improve systems over which Pakistan has no control and no right of recall.
This is not a theoretical concern. Platforms operated by companies based in the United States may be subject to American law, including the CLOUD Act, under which data can be accessed by U.S. authorities even where it is stored outside the United States. In such a case, Pakistan's Constitution, courts, and regulators may have no effective ability to prevent or review access. Judicial data, once transferred into foreign infrastructure, is no longer governed solely by Pakistani law.
The danger is not limited to privacy. Judicial data contains the reasoning of the state, the arguments of citizens, the interpretation of constitutional rights, and the legal treatment of politically, socially, and economically sensitive disputes. Even where individual documents are anonymised, repeated inputs can reveal patterns. AI systems can infer judicial tendencies, reconstruct institutional profiles, and absorb legal logic into future commercial models. The harm lies not only in one document, but in the aggregate.
Other jurisdictions have recognised this. China has developed judicial AI within domestic infrastructure. India's SUPACE initiative remains institutionally controlled. The European Union treats legal and judicial AI as high-risk, requiring traceability, auditability, and human oversight. Brazil's Supreme Federal Court developed Victor within its own judicial system to assist in case grouping and classification. These examples show that judicial AI is not merely a technical matter. It is a governance issue tied directly to sovereignty.
Pakistan has not yet drawn the necessary line. There is no national judicial data infrastructure. There is no statutory framework specifically regulating AI use in courts. There is no binding requirement to disclose whether AI has been used in judicial reasoning, legal submissions, translations, or research. Nor is there a clear prohibition against uploading court records, draft orders, pleadings, or confidential legal material to public AI systems.
The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2023 is a step toward regulating personal information, but it does not sufficiently address judicial data as a distinct class of sovereign information. Court records are not ordinary commercial data. They may involve privilege, constitutional rights, state interests, vulnerable parties, criminal proceedings, family disputes, and matters of public power. Treating them like routine personal data would be a serious underestimation of their institutional value.
Pakistan's Constitution already provides the foundation for a stricter approach. Article 14 protects dignity and privacy. Article 4 guarantees the right to be dealt with in accordance with law. When judicial data is processed outside the jurisdiction without control, transparency, or consent, these rights are weakened in practice. The law is not necessarily broken by a single upload; it is bypassed by a system that has not yet been regulated.
The Supreme Court has also acknowledged the constitutional limits of AI in the judicial process. In C.P.L.A. No. 1010-L/2022, Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah cautioned that artificial intelligence may assist legal research and administrative facilitation, but it cannot replace judicial reasoning, discretion, empathy, due process, or human oversight. The judgment stands for the principle that technology may support justice, but must never substitute the constitutional function of adjudication.
Pakistan now requires a clear national judicial data policy. All court-related data, from pleadings and evidence to orders and judgments, should be stored on servers physically located in Pakistan and subject to Pakistani law. AI systems used by courts should be approved, auditable, and trained or adapted under domestic legal supervision. Public AI tools should not be used for confidential judicial material unless expressly authorised under a secure framework.
A dedicated statutory authority or judicial technology regulator should be empowered to govern access to judicial data, approve AI systems, set retention and audit standards, and investigate misuse. Any use of AI in judicial work should be disclosed, including the tool used, the purpose of use, and whether any court data was uploaded or processed. Judges, lawyers, clerks, and court staff must also be trained to understand that data handling is no longer an administrative issue alone. It is now part of constitutional responsibility.
This is not an argument against innovation. Pakistan needs technology to improve access to justice, reduce delay, and modernise the courts. But technology must be built around sovereignty, not at its expense. The judiciary cannot protect constitutional rights through systems that place its own data beyond constitutional control.
Judicial data is not a convenience. It is not an efficiency metric. It is a national asset. Like all strategic assets, it must be secured, governed, and protected by the people and institutions to whom it belongs.