Who We Are
Hope, support and justice for a fairer tomorrow.
We’re not here to relitigate anyone’s case. We’re here for what happens after.
When a Pakistani court finally acquits someone, or a sentence runs its course, that person walks out of the gate with no severance, no transition plan, and usually no welcome. Their family has often spent years — and whatever savings they had — on legal fees, bribes and bus fare for visits to a prison hours from home.
The person being released is frequently unemployable, sometimes sick, and almost always treated like the crime they were never actually convicted of still happened.
What Zakia Khanum Trust Provides
A short, structured bridge back into ordinary life.
- Clothing and transport home on the day of release.
- A small grant to restart an income.
- Six months of professional counseling.
Given that this detention is a failure of the state’s own justice system, we don’t think of this as charity. We think of it as restitution.
Our Mission
We support Pakistan’s wrongfully and unjustly detained in securing their release and rebuilding their lives afterward, while pushing for a justice system that doesn’t leave anyone to rebuild from nothing.
Our Vision
A Pakistan where no one is imprisoned without cause, and every person, once free, has the opportunity to rebuild their life with dignity and support.
Why This Isn’t Charity
Pakistan’s Constitution presumes innocence until proven otherwise. The Supreme Court has ruled, more than once, that denying bail without real cause amounts to punishing someone before they’ve been convicted of anything. And Pakistan has ratified international commitments — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the UN’s Nelson Mandela Rules — that explicitly require the state to support prisoner rehabilitation and reintegration, not abandonment at the prison gate. In practice, almost none of that happens. We’re building the piece that’s missing.
Contact Us →This Isn’t Hypothetical
Human Rights Watch has documented the case of a man in Lahore, arrested for petty theft, who spent seven years in judicial remand waiting for witnesses who never appeared in court. In a separate case, a man held as a drug courier spent eight years awaiting trial before his case finally concluded — in an acquittal, one of the roughly 98% of Punjab drug cases that end that way. Neither man is unusual. Cases like theirs are the ordinary output of a system where trials routinely run for years and courts often set bail at amounts far beyond what most Pakistani families could raise in a decade.
Justice is not just about the courtroom;
it’s about what happens after.