In April 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released the Panama Papers—a 2.6-terabyte archive of 11.5 million leaked files from Mossack Fonseca, which exposed the offshore networks of more than 210,000 companies across 21 jurisdictions. The revelations implicated political elites worldwide, including Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his family. What followed in Pakistan was unprecedented: street protests, high-stakes court battles, and ultimately the disqualification of a sitting prime minister. To many, this moment appeared to be a triumph of journalism and accountability in Pakistan, a case where transparency forced the state to act.
Yet, when viewed against Pakistan’s broader political history and the subsequent waves of leaks—the Pandora Papers (2021), Dubai Leaks (2024), and others—a more complex picture emerges. Post-Panama “accountability” in Pakistan reflected not institutional strength but political convenience, driven by powerful elites’ interests and their internal struggles for influence.
Pakistan functions within what scholars describe as a hybrid political system, where formal institutions such as parliament, the judiciary, and regulatory bodies exist, but informal power centres, most notably the military establishment, influential commercial families, and unelected networks, often shape the real outcomes of politics. These informal actors frequently determine whether accountability moves forward or stalls. In such a system, journalism often steps in to fill the gaps left by weak enforcement and inconsistent oversight. But its impact is rarely determined by journalistic rigour alone; rather, it hinges on how powerful actors choose to weaponise, embrace, or ignore the disclosures. In such an environment, journalism can momentarily become the primary check on power, even as the system around it remains selective and politically constrained.
A Legacy of Courage: The Evolution of Accountability Journalism in Pakistan
While the media have always held significant influence in Pakistan, often challenging authoritarianism, exposing elite corruption, and confronting the state, its history is marked by cycles of resistance, repression, and remarkable courage.
One of the earliest and most influential examples was Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah, a pioneering journalist in the 1950s whose editorials in The Mirror fiercely criticised the authoritarian regime of then-President Iskander Mirza and condemned the forced resignation of Prime Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy. In response, her publication was banned for six months in 1957. Despite pressure to apologise publicly, Hamidullah, with the support of renowned lawyer A. K. Brohi, challenged the ban in the Supreme Court and won. Another landmark moment came in 1971 through the work of Anthony Mascarenhas. His exposé “Genocide”, published in The Sunday Times (UK), drew global attention to the crisis in East Pakistan and is widely believed to have shaped international opinion.
Moving to the post-9/11 era, journalists increasingly focused on militancy, intelligence agencies, and security-sector excesses. In 2011, Syed Saleem Shahzad, writing for Asia Times Online, reported on alleged links between Al Qaeda and the Pakistan Navy, suggesting that militant infiltration contributed to the Mehran naval base attack. Shortly after publishing the report, Shahzad was abducted and murdered under circumstances widely attributed to extrajudicial actions by intelligence operatives, reinforcing the high risks associated with media and journalism in Pakistan’s security landscape.
In parallel, investigative journalist Umar Cheema emerged as a central figure in exposing elite impunity. His 2012 report “Representation Without Taxation”, based on leaked Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) data, revealed that nearly 70% of Pakistan’s 446 lawmakers had not filed income tax returns in 2011, including President Asif Ali Zardari and the majority of the federal cabinet. The report provoked national outrage but also led to severe personal consequences for Cheema, who was abducted and tortured—reportedly by intelligence operatives—and subjected to beatings, humiliation, and psychological coercion. By 2016, journalism in Pakistan had reached a new stage of transnational collaborations, including the Panama Papers, and continued with the Pandora and Dubai Leaks in later years. Pakistani journalists have remained integral to these projects, often highlighting offshore wealth and elite networks that domestic institutions either ignore or inadequately regulate.
From Panama to Dubai: Investigative Leaks and the Limits of Exposure
The Panama Papers in 2016 marked the beginning of this new wave of major transnational leak investigations, with Umar Cheema and others reporting the findings in Pakistan. The leaks exposed the offshore holdings of political elites and became a textbook manifestation of the Watchdog Theory of Journalism, which positions journalists as guardians of the public interest. The revelations shifted Pakistan’s national discourse, activating political parties, civil society organisations, and media networks, all of which amplified public pressure on state institutions.
One of the strongest political responses came from the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the country’s main opposition party at the time. It was led by Imran Khan, a former international cricket star who had reinvented himself as an anti-corruption populist. The PTI filed petitions before the Supreme Court, which took suo motu notice, established a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) in 2017, and disqualified Sharif under Article 62(1)(f) for lacking “honesty and trustworthiness”. In 2018 he received a ten-year sentence in the Avenfield case.
But the intensity of the state’s response during Panama would not be repeated. As PTI moved from opposition to government, the political and institutional incentives that once enabled aggressive accountability no longer aligned in the same way. The Pandora Papers, released in October 2021 and investigated in Pakistan by Umar Cheema and Fakhar Durrani, exposed offshore dealings of more than 700 Pakistanis, including business magnates, retired military officials, senior bureaucrats, and members of the then-ruling PTI cabinet. The PTI had risen to power on an anti-corruption platform and had previously led the accountability campaign during the Panama Papers scandal, which resulted in the disqualification of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), one of the country’s major political parties. This widened the scope of elite offshore networks far beyond what Panama had revealed. Yet the state’s response was markedly different. A high-level inquiry cell under the Prime Minister’s Inspection Commission initiated a fact-finding process, reportedly completing 80% of its work by early 2022. Despite this, no meaningful prosecutions, resignations, or judicial proceedings followed.
This pattern of exposure without consequence became even more pronounced in the next major leak. The Dubai Unlocked investigation in May 2024, coordinated globally by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and domestically by Atika Rehman, Naziha Syed Ali, Fakhar Durrani, and Umar Cheema, provided unprecedented insight into Pakistani wealth in Dubai’s real estate sector. Data from C4ADS revealed that thousands of Pakistani citizens, spanning political, military, bureaucratic, and business elites, owned properties valued at over $11 billion. While the leaks sparked public discussion, state institutions responded with muted inquiries rather than meaningful legal action. The FBR claimed it would examine compliance, yet no significant legal proceedings or policy reforms emerged. Unlike Panama, where judicial and political responses were rapid and decisive, the Pandora Papers and Dubai Leaks revealed the diminishing capacity of journalism to influence entrenched power structures, especially when media owners, military elites, and some journalists themselves appeared in the leaks.
The Hybrid System at Work: Why Transparency Often Fails in Pakistan
Taken together, these scandals make clear that the real issue lies not in the leaks themselves but in the political system that consistently neutralises them. This pattern reveals a deeper structural feature of Pakistan’s hybrid constitutional order. Drawing on Denis Galligan’s insight in Keepers of the Common Good, constitutional authority is not sustained merely by formal institutions but by the lived expectations citizens hold about how those institutions will respond to wrongdoing. A constitutional system remains legitimate only when the people, as the ultimate source of sovereign authority, believe that public power is exercised for the common good and that the exposure of misconduct leads to corrective action. In Pakistan, however, the state’s refusal to act on facts uncovered by journalists has itself become an entrenched constitutional practice. Wrongdoing becomes publicly visible, the media furnishes extensive documentation, institutions acknowledge the information at the margins, and then the system consciously settles back into equilibrium. Over time, it erodes constitutional trust: citizens learn that transparency does not guarantee accountability and that the system’s tolerance for exposure is part of its design rather than a temporary malfunction.
Within this setting, the role of the media in Pakistan as the democratic watchdog becomes both essential and fundamentally limited. It remains essential because journalism continues to perform oversight functions that other institutions evade. Yet it is limited because exposure is not enforcement. As long as the state’s structural logic allows it to endure, and even normalise, public revelation without systemic adjustment, Pakistan will persist in a constitutional condition where truth is fully visible but institutionally inert.