The Supreme Court has released a detailed 12-page judgment explaining why it dismissed Zahir Jaffer’s review petition against his death sentence in the murder of Noor Mukadam, using unusually strong language about crimes against women, Dawn reported.
Why the Detailed Judgment Matters
The three-judge bench had already thrown out Jaffer’s review petition on June 4, upholding the death sentence handed down for the 2021 murder. What is new is the written reasoning behind that decision, authored by Justice Ishtiaq Ibrahim, which was made public this week. The judgment explains at length why the review petition could not succeed and why the court views violence against women as a matter of the utmost seriousness.
According to Dawn, the judgment states that a petition under Article 188 of the Constitution to review a court’s earlier judgment is not, and cannot be permitted to be, an appeal in disguise. It does not offer a forum to reargue the case, reappraise evidence or reopen questions of fact that have already been settled.
The Case Against Zahir Jaffer
Noor Mukadam, the 27 year old daughter of a former Pakistani ambassador, was found murdered at Jaffer’s residence in Islamabad’s Sector F-7/4 in July 2021. Investigators said she had been tortured and beheaded, and that she had made repeated attempts to escape the house on the night she was killed before being blocked by members of Jaffer’s household staff.
A trial court sentenced Jaffer to death in February 2022. The Islamabad High Court upheld that sentence in 2023, and the Supreme Court itself confirmed it in a May 2025 ruling. Jaffer’s subsequent review petition, filed through Advocate Khawaja Haris, argued that the court should have given greater weight to his mental state at the time of the killing. The bench rejected that argument, finding no error in the earlier record serious enough to justify reopening the case.
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Strong Language on Violence Against Women
Dawn reported that the judgment goes beyond the narrow legal question of the review petition to address violence against women more broadly, describing such crimes as a betrayal of both divine and national values. The bench’s language has been read by legal commentators as a deliberate signal from the country’s top court on how seriously it regards cases of this kind.
Noor Mukadam’s father, Shaukat Mukadam, has previously thanked the media for its sustained coverage of the case and urged other families facing similar circumstances not to give up on pursuing justice through the courts.
What Comes Next
With the review petition dismissed and the reasoning behind that decision now on the record, legal experts say Jaffer’s remaining options are extremely limited. The only route left open to him under Pakistani law is a mercy petition to the president under Article 45 of the Constitution. The case, one of the most closely watched in Pakistan’s recent legal history, has been widely cited in debates over the protection of women and the pace of the justice system in high-profile crimes.
